Authors

British · 1840–1928

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who chronicled the decline of traditional rural Wessex life with compassion and fatalistic irony. His major novels — Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895) — were enormous successes and enormous controversies. After Jude's hostile reception he turned entirely to poetry, producing several volumes of lyric verse that are now ranked among the finest in English. He wrote The Dynasts (1904-08), a vast epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, as his theatrical work.