Thomas Hardy — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Hardy was born in a Dorset cottage in 1840, the son of a stonemason, and trained as an architect — working on church restoration in London and Dorset before fiction became viable. His first novel was rejected on the advice of George Meredith; Far from the Madding Crowd, serialised anonymously in 1874, made his name. He set most of his fiction in 'Wessex', a semi-fictional version of the south-west of England, and the region became the imaginative unit of his work. The hostile reception of Jude the Obscure in 1895 — one bishop reportedly burned it — ended his career as a novelist, and he spent his last three decades writing poetry, publishing his first collection at fifty-eight. His marriage to Emma Gifford was long unhappy, and her death in 1912 produced his finest sequence of poems.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

1891

Plot summary

Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor Dorset family who learn they descend from the ancient d'Urbervilles, is sent to claim kinship with a wealthy family who have simply bought the name. Alec d'Urberville seduces or rapes her — the text is deliberately unclear — and she returns home, bears a child who dies unbaptised, and later finds work at a dairy where she falls in love with Angel Clare. On their wedding night she confesses her past after Angel has confessed his own; he abandons her. Reduced to brutal field labour, and with her family destitute, she returns to Alec. When Angel comes back, Tess kills Alec, and after a few days together the two are found at Stonehenge. Tess is hanged.

Literary analysis

The subtitle — A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented — was the novel's provocation, an explicit challenge to the Victorian double standard, and Hardy's narrator repeatedly insists on Tess's innocence against the judgement of society and of Angel, whose supposed modernity fails at exactly the point where it is tested. Hardy's determinism operates through coincidence and mistimed letters, which critics have attacked as contrivance and defended as the formal expression of a universe indifferent to human deserving. The closing sentence, with its remark about the President of the Immortals ending his sport with Tess, states that indifference explicitly, and the novel's landscapes — the lush Froom valley, the flinty upland of Flintcomb-Ash — move with her fortunes.

Why Hardy Matters

Hardy stands at the junction of Victorian and modern literature: his fiction dismantles Victorian sexual morality and religious consolation, and his poetry, plain in diction and irregular in metre, influenced Philip Larkin and a whole line of twentieth-century English verse. Wessex remains the model for the invented but geographically consistent literary region. For examinations he supports questions on determinism and tragedy in the novel, on rural displacement and agricultural change, and on the Victorian-to-modernist transition.

Key Facts

Trained as an architect

He worked in church restoration before writing full time, and architectural structure marks his handling of settings.

Wessex

He revived the old name for the south-west of England and mapped his novels onto a consistent invented geography.

Quit fiction after Jude

The outcry over Jude the Obscure in 1895 led him to stop writing novels; he published poetry for the next thirty years.

Poems of 1912–13

After his estranged wife Emma's death he wrote the elegiac sequence generally regarded as his finest poetry.

All Major Works

Far from the Madding Crowd1874
The Return of the Native1878
The Mayor of Casterbridge1886
Tess of the d'Urbervilles1891
Jude the Obscure1895
Wessex Poems1898
The Dynasts1904–08
Poems of 1912–131914