Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in a small village in Dorset, in the south-west of England; his father was a stonemason and builder, his mother a passionate reader. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a local architect and later worked as an architect in London, teaching himself Greek and Latin in his spare time and reading widely in literature and philosophy. In his early thirties he gave up architecture for writing and, modelling it on his native region, imagined a country called 'Wessex', where most of his novels are set. His novels lay bare the pitilessness of fate and the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, and they caused great controversy. When Jude the Obscure was savaged on publication, and a bishop even burned the book publicly, he wrote no more novels and turned wholly to poetry. He lived to eighty-seven; his heart was buried in the churchyard of his native parish and his ashes placed in Westminster Abbey.