English literature the book is designed to acquaint students with the main outlines

Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy was born in southwestern England, western Dorsetshire. His father, a skilled stone-mason, taught his son to play violin and sent him to a country day school. At the age of fifteen Hardy began to study architecture, and in 1861 he went to London to begin a career. There he tried poetry, then a career as an actor, and finally decided to write fiction.

Hardy’s home and the surrounding districts played an important

role in his literary career. The region was agricultural, and there were monuments of the past, that is Saxon and Roman ruins and the great boulders of Stonehenge, which reminded of the prehis­ toric times, before the Norman invasion of 1066

First, Hardy aimed his fiction at serial publication in maga­ zines, where it would most quickly pay the bills. Not forgetting an earlier dream, he resolved to keep his tales “as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow.” The emotional power of Hardy’s fiction disturbed readers from the start. His first success, “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1874). was fol­ lowed by “The Return of the Native” (1878), “The Mayor of Casterbridge”(1885), and “Tess of the D’Urber/illes” (1891). Hardy wrote about the Dorset country-side he knew well and called it Wessex (the name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom once located there). He wrote about agrarian working peopic, milk­ maids, stonecutters, and shepherds. Hardy's rejection of middle- class moral values disturbed and shocked some readers, but as time passed, his novels gained in popularity and prestige. An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final impression was cne of a malign. It was fate, functioning in men’s lives, corrupting their possibili­ ties of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. While he saw life thus as cruel and purposeless, he did not remain a de­ tached spectator. He has pity for the puppets of Destiny, and it is a compassion that extends from man to the earth-worn, and the diseased leaves of the tree. Such a conception gave his novels a high seriousness which few ofhis contemporaries possessed.

No theory can in itself make a novelist, and Hardy’s novels,