Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the son of a Dorset mason, and trained as an architect before making his living from the novel and setting his work in a reconstructed Wessex. The hostility of the critics led him to give up the novel at the age of fifty-five, and he wrote only poems for thirty years, more than nine hundred in all. He refused a knighthood and received the Order of Merit. He died in 1928: his heart was buried in Dorset and the rest of him at Westminster.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelTess of the d'UrbervillesThomas Hardy · 1891LiteraturePublic domain