The Return of the Native (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, in Dorsetshire, England, on July 2, 1840. His father and grandfather were master masons, and it was expected that he would be one also; but as a young man he excelled in his academic studies, learning Latin and Greek and studying poetry. At age sixteen, he left school to be an apprentice architect in nearby Dorchester.

In 1862, he moved to London to work with a noted architect. It was then that he started writing in his spare time. His first love was poetry, but he had trouble getting his work published. In 1868 he returned to Dorset as an architect. He began writing novels, publishing the first one, Desperate Remedies, in 1871. The three novels that he wrote over the next three years were successful, so that after publishing Far From the Madding Crowd in serial form in 1874, he was able to quit architecture.

Hardy's work met with commercial and critical success. However, starting with The Return of the Native in 1878, Hardy's fiction began to gain a reputation for its salacious treatment of sexual relationships. When Tess of the D'Urbervilles was published in book form in 1891, he included scenes that had been cut out of the magazine serialization because they were considered too scandalous. As a result, Hardy became a controversial figure. With the publication of Jude the Obscure, critical and popular opinion began to turn against him.

Because of this negative publicity, Hardy quit writing novels more than thirty years before his death. After 1895, he concentrated all of his literary efforts on poetry. He published the poems that had been rejected early in his career, along with new works: Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1902). After his wife's death in 1912, he published a book of short, bitter poems about marriage, Satire of Circumstances; yet additional poems published later showed a fond and tender remembrances for their courtship and early years. In 1914 he married Florence Emily Dugdale, who had been his secretary for years.

Between 1898 and his death in 1928, he published eight volumes of poetry. As a senior literary figure, he was an influence on many twentieth-century writers, such as Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Virginia Woolf. After a short illness, Hardy died on January 11, 1928. His ashes are buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, next to those of Charles Dickens. His heart was removed and buried separately in Dorset.