Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born near Dorchester, trained as an architect, and turned to fiction in his thirties. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are set in the “Wessex” he mapped onto the south-west of England. After the reception of Jude he wrote no more novels and devoted his last thirty years to poetry, publishing eight volumes and the verse drama The Dynasts.