THOMAS HARDY

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), English poet and novelist, famous for his depictions of the imaginary county " Wessex " . Hardy's work reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life. Thomas Hardy was born on Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester on June 2, 1840. His father was a master mason and building contractor. Hardy's mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester , Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford. At the age of 22 Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized the rural life. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester . Unable to find a public for his poetry, Hardy turned to fiction. His first novel, The Poor Man And The Lady, was written in 1867, but the book was rejected by many publishers and he destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice, was Far From The Madding Crowd (1874). After its success Hardy devoted himself entirely to writing and produced a series of novels, among them The Return Of The Native (1878) and The Mayor Of Casterbridge (1886).

Tess Of The D'urbervilles(1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. Hardy's next novel, Jude The Obscure (1895) aroused even more debate. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life. In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure , Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again.
During the remainder of his life, Hardy wrote several collections of poems. His gigantic panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors

in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Emma Hardy died in 1912 and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale. From 1920 through 1927 Hardy worked on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Hardy's last book published in his lifetime was Human Shows (1925). Hardy died in Dorchester, Dorset , on January 11, 1928. His ashes were cremated in Dorchester and buried with impressive ceremonies in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. Hardy's Winter Words appeared posthumously in 1928. English poet and regional novelist, whose works depict the county " Wessex ", named after the ancient kingdom of Alfred the Great. Hardy's career as writer spanned over fifty years. His earliest books appeared when Anthony Trollope (1815-82) wrote his Palliser series, and he published poetry in the decade of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land . Hardy's work reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life. "Critics can never be made to understand that that the failure may be greater than the success... To have the strength to roll a stone weighting a hundredweight to the top of a mountain is a success, and to have the strength to roll a stone of then hundredweight only halfway up that mount is a failure. But the latter is two or three times as strong a deed." (Hardy in his diary, 1907) Thomas Hardy's own life wasn't similar to his stories. He was born in the village of Higher Bockhampton , on the edge of Puddletown Heath. His father was a master mason and building contractor. With a certain pride the author once said, that although his ancestors never rose above the level of a mastermason, they never sunk below it. Hardy's mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester , Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, for whom he wrote 40 years later, after her death, a group of poems known as VETERIS VESTIGIAE FLAMMAE (Vestiges of an Old Flame). At the age of 22 Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized the rural life. He was an assistant in the architectural firm of Arthur

Blomfield, visited art galleries, attended evening classes in French at King's College, enjoyed Shakespeare and opera, and read works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mills, whose positivism influenced him deeply. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester . During this period of his life Hardy entered into a temporary engagement with Tryphena Sparks, a pretty and lively sixteen-year-old relative. Hardy continued his architectural career, but encouraged by Emma Lavinia Gifford, he started to consider literature as his "true vocation." Hardy did not first find public for his poetry and the novelist George Meredith advised Hardy to write a novel. THE POOR MAN AND THE LADY, written in 1867, was rejected by many publishers and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice was FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1874). After its success Hardy was convinced that he could earn his living by his pen. Devoting himself entirely to writing, Hardy produced a series of novels. TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. It explored the dark side of his family connections in Berkshire . In the story the poor villager girl Tess Durbeyfield is seduced by the wealthy Alec D'Uberville. She becomes pregnant but the child dies in infancy. Tess finds work as a dairymaid on a farm and falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman's son, who marries her. When Tess tells Angel about her past, he hypocritically deserts her. Tess becomes Alec's mistress. Angel returns from Brazil , repenting his harshness, but finds her living with Alec. Tess kills Alec in desperation, she is arrested and hanged. Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895) aroused even more controversy. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, tracing Jude Fawley's life from his boyhood to his early death. Jude marries Arabella, but deserts her. He falls in love with his cousin, hypersensitive Sue Bridehead, who marries the decaying schoolmaster, Phillotson, in a masochist fit. Jude and Sue obtain divorces, but their life together deteriorates under the pressure of poverty and social disapproval. The eldest son of Jude and Arabella, a grotesque boy nicknamed 'Father Time', kills their children and himself. Broken by the loss, Sue goes back to Phillotson, and Jude returns to Arabella. Soon thereafter Jude dies, and his last words are: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?". In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again. A bishop solemnly

burnt the book, "probably in his despair at not being able to burn me", Hardy noted. Hardy's marriage had also suffered from the public outrage critics on both sides of the Atlantic abused the author as degenerate and called the work itself disgusting. In April, 1912, Hardy wrote: "Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work - austere in its treatment of a difficult subject - as if the writer had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect on myself - the experience completely curing me of the further interest in novelwriting." By 1885 the Hardys had settled near Dorchester at Max Gate, a house designed by the author and built by his brother, Henry. With the exceptions of seasonal stays in London and occasional excursions abroad, his Bockhampton home, "a modest house, providing neither more nor less than the accommodation ... needed" (as Michael Millgate describes it in his biography of the author) was his home for the rest of his life. After giving up the novel, Hardy brought out a first group of Wessex poems, some of which had been composed 30 years before. During the remainder of his life, Hardy continued to publish several collections of poems. "Hardy, in fact, was the ideal poet of a generation. He was the most passionate and the most learned of them all. He had the luck, singular in poets, of being able to achieve a competence other than by poetry and then devote the ending years of his life to his beloved verses." (Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature, 1938) Hardy's gigantic panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, THE DYNASTS, composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Hardy kept to his childless marriage with Emma Gifford although it was unhappy and he had or he imagined he had affairs with other women passing briefly through his life. Emma Hardy died in 1912 and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale, a woman in her 30's, almost 40 years younger than he. Their relationship had started from a fan letter she sent him. From 1920 through 1927 Hardy concentrated on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Hardy's last book was HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES,

SONGS AND TRIFLES (1925). WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES appeared posthumously in 1928. Hardy died in Dorchester, Dorset , on January 11, 1928. Eva Dugtale washed his body and prepared it for burial. Hardy's ashes were cremated in Dorchester and buried with impressive ceremonies in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. According to a literary anecdote his heart was to be buried in Stinsford, his birthplace. All went according to plan, until a cat belonging to the poet's sister snatched the heart off the kitchen, where it was temporarily kept, and disappeared into the woods with it. Hardy bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious conventions of the Victorian age. The center of his novels was the rather desolate and historyfreighted countryside around Dorchester . In the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin 's Origin of Species (1859), Hardy's faith was still unshaken, but he soon adopted the mechanical-determinist view of universe's cruelty, reflected in the inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality his mood was often stoically hopeless. "Though he was a modern, even a revolutionary writer in his time, most of us read him now as a lyrical pastoralist. It may be a sign of the times that some of us take his books to bed, as if even his pessimistic vision was one that enabled us to sleep soundly." The life and literary career of Thomas Hardy, the subversive Victorian novelist and late-blossoming modern poet, has been the subject of a number of recent biographies, not to mention the one he wrote and passed off as his second wife Florence 's work. The man who wrote "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jude the Obscure" (among other great novels) and a large collection of innovative poems was a complex and secretive man. "THOMAS HARDY" The basic facts and direction of Hardy's lifeBy are Claire Tomalin well established. Born into a poor family in Penguin Press ($35) rural southwest England , he received his education in a local school and was unable to go on to university. Instead he apprenticed with an architect, moved to London , where he found that work unsatisfactory, and moved back to Dorset , where he worked and continued to educate himself.

He courted his first wife, Emma Gifford, the daughter of an impoverished but genteel couple. They objected to Hardy, but the young couple married anyway and distanced themselves from both families. Hardy began to write fiction and eventually gained fame, notoriety and wealth as a novelist who realized the dream of the social class he criticized. At times his literary career shocked and surprised his contemporaries and raised questions that subsequent biographers and critics have pursued. His friend Edmund Gosse, in a review of "Jude," wrote, "What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?" Others have wondered why Hardy continued to claim, the evidence of his novels to the contrary, that he was not a pessimist. Why did he stop writing novels at the height of his fame? Did he have a tragic love affair and an illegitimate child with his cousin Tryphena Sparks? Claire Tomalin, whose previous biographies show a persistent interest in literature, in secrets, and in the lives of women involved in secret or irregular relationships, addresses all these questions. Some, of course, are matters of fact. On the relationship with Tryphena, for instance, Tomalin tells us that testimony by a relative, the existence of a poem written just after she died, and some other information support the possibility of an affair. But the historical record supplies no smoking gun, no proof of this relationship, which some writers believe decisively shaped Hardy's sensibility and the tone of much of his literary work. This is typical of Tomalin's practice throughout the book: She sums up what others have learned and takes us only as far as the evidence allows. When she speculates, as she does in interesting ways, she makes that fact clear. Her work is particularly strong in using the facts of Hardy's life to illuminate recurring themes, characters and situations in his writing and in offering suggestive readings of that work. Hardy emerges from this study as a thinskinned man who carried with him, even after his great personal good fortune, the scars created by his humble origins, by his early social and economic frustrations, and by the snubs and condescension of a class-conscious society. Tomalin's tale is particularly strong on Hardy's relationships with women. She has made good use of the diary of Emma, his first wife. She tries, quite

successfully, I think, to see Hardy as Emma and other women close to him might have seen him. By his own admission he had a roving eye and was easily infatuated. Both before and after his marriage he managed to carry on longterm relationships with intelligent, attractive and sometimes married women, yet he could also be coldly indifferent to those he loved. Given Tomalin's interests, it is understandable that she would focus on another Hardy surprise, the production of brilliant poetry about Emma and their relationship just after her death. The poems, full of tender, loving and remorseful feelings, were surprising because for many years the couple had become indifferent and at times hostile companions. Emma had moved to a room of her own and become quite eccentric, if not deranged. She became religious and publicly disparaged her husband's work. At the time of Emma's death, Hardy was in love with Florence Dugdale, who would be his second wife. Yet shortly thereafter he surprised and embarrassed her by publishing these poems. Florence never believed the feelings he expressed in those poems, and Hardy didn't care about her reaction. Tomalin explains at length why she thinks these poems are so fine. Indeed, she thinks it was only at this moment, just before World War I, that Hardy became a great poet. So why did Hardy write these poems? Tomalin doesn't explain this mystery. She finished the book before the appearance, in December, 2006, of an essay by Robert Alan Frizzell, a retired physician, which might answer that question and Edmund Gosse's as well. Why was Hardy so angry and so secretive? Frizzell reviewed evidence of Emma Hardy's illness and concluded that she showed all the symptoms of neurosyphilis, and that it was almost certainly her husband who infected her. He then points to specific poems which support his diagnosis. While Tomalin may have missed an important piece of the Hardy puzzle, her portrait of this complex and conflicted writer and her careful and suggestive readings of both the novels and the poetry represent an original, compelling interpretation of this constantly surprising writer. Religious beliefs

Hardy's early religious experience was with the Plymouth Brethren. He was often in the company of Henry R. Bastow, a fellow architect, when they studied the Greek New Testament together. Bastow went to Australia maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired to these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. Hardy's links with the Brethren also concluded. Hardys idea of fate in life gave way to his philosophical struggle with God. Although Hardys faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question God and His traditional meaning in the Christian sense. Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism and spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied,

. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the tence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. haps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently ished Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer, and other agnostics.[6] Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits.[6] Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God. A sentence found in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles neatly sums up Hardy's philosophical stance: In Far From the Madding Crowd, Oaks entire flock, and livelihood, dies. For Oak, being a simple farmer with nothing to his name, to encounter such a loss is a tragedy wherein Hardy wants his readers to consider the role of God in this type of situation along with the universes cruelty. Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardys novels as he became friends with a Dorchester minister, Hourace Moule. Moule also influenced Hardys point of view by introducing him to scientific studies and ideas that questioned the

literal meaning of the Bible.[7] These new ideas, along with Darwinism, and a series of unsettling events in Hardys life may be the reason for his pessimistic attitude that is perceived by many critics and readers alike.[8] Novels Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith. Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name. Hardy said that he first introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his next (and first important) novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels. The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they moved for a last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes.

Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". Heavily criticized for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as being autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. [4] In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop - probably in his despair at not being able to burn me".

Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several blockbuster novels under his belt, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up writing novels altogether. Several critics have commented, however, that there was very little left for Hardy to write about,[citation needed] having creatively exhausted the increasingly fatalistic tone of his novels Literary themes Although he wrote a great deal of poetry, mostly unpublished until after 1898, Hardy is best remembered for the series of novels and short stories he wrote between 1871 and 1895. His novels are set in the imaginary world of Wessex, a large area of south and south-west England , using the name of the AngloSaxon kingdom that covered the area. Hardy was part of two worlds; on the one hand he had a deep emotional bond with the rural way of life which he had known as a child, but on the other he was aware of the changes which were under way, and the current social problems from the innovations in agriculture - he captured the epoch just before the railways and the industrial revolution changed the English countryside - to the unfairness and hypocrisy of Victorian sexual behaviour. Hardy critiques certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. Considered a Victorian Realist writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status quo. These rules hinder the lives of all involved and ultimately lead to a life of unhappiness. In Two on a Tower, Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by creating a romantic story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The reader is forced to consider the option of disposing of the conventions set up for love. 19th century society enforces the conventions and societal pressure ensures conformity. Swithin St Cleeve is idyllic against social constraints. He is a meaningful, unique individual set up against the dictating confinements of the conventions of social structure. Hardys stories take into consideration the events of life and their effects. Fate plays a big role as the thematic basis for many of his novels. Characters are constantly encountering crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition. Far From the Madding Crowd tells a tale of lives that are constructed by chance. Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had

Fanny not missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an entirely different path.[9] Once things have been put into motion, they will play out. Hardys characters are in the grips of too much overwhelming fate. He paints a vivid picture of rural life in the nineteenth century, with all its joys and suffering, a fatalistic world full of superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often alienated from society and rarely become readmitted into it. He tends to emphasize the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental passion, deep instinct, the human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change. Tess, for example, ends with some of the most poignant lines in British Literature on this theme:

Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in schylean phrase, had Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a l motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they again, and went on.
In particular, Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure is full of the sense of crisis of the later Victorian period (as witnessed in Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'). It describes the tragedy of two new social types, Jude Fawley, a working man who attempts to educate himself, and his lover and cousin, Sue Bridehead, who represents the 'new woman' of the 1890s.[10] His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation and acute sensitiveness. He notices the smallest and most delicate details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in melancholy or noble moods.[11] (His eye for poignant detail - such as the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and little Jude's suicide note - often came from clippings from newspaper reports of real events). Poetry For the full text of several poems, see the External links section

In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence on Philip Larkin. However, critically it is still not regarded as highly as his prose. Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Some, like The Darkling Thrush and An August Midnight, appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful ballads of the moment such as the little-known The Children and Sir Nameless, a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns, builders of Athelhampton. A few of Hardy's poems, such as The Blinded Bird (a melancholy polemic against the sport of vinkenzetting), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in the RSPCA.[12] Composers who have set Hardy's text to music include Gerald Finzi, who produced six song-cycles for poems by Hardy, Benjamin Britten, who based his song-cycle Winter Words on Hardy's poetry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Holst also based one of his last orchestral works, Egdon Heath, on Hardy's work. It is said to be Holst's masterpiece. Composer Lee Hoiby's setting of "The Darkling Thrush" became the basis of the multimedia opera Darkling and Timothy Takach, a graduate of St. Olaf, has also put "The Darkling Thrush" into arrangement for a 4-part mixed choir. Works Prose Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes: Novels of Character and Environment

The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost) Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) The Return of the Native (1878) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) The Woodlanders (1887) Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories) Jude the Obscure (1895)

Romances and Fantasies

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) The Trumpet-Major (1880) Two on a Tower (1882) A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories) The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).

Novels of Ingenuity

Desperate Remedies (1871) The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) A Laodicean (1881)

Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912-1913) and the 37volume Mellstock Edition (1919-1920). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928-1930, as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, now published in a critical one-volume edition as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984). Poetry (not a comprehensive list)

The Photograph (1890) Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

and poems)

Poems of the Past and Present (1901) The Dynasts, Part 1 (1904) The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906) The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908) Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909) Satires of Circumstance (1914) Moments of Vision (1917) Collected Poems (1919, part of the Mellstock Edition of his novels

Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922) Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928, published posthumously)
Drama The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923) Locations in novels

Berkshire is North Wessex, Devon is Lower Wessex, Dorset is South Wessex, Somerset is Outer or Nether Wessex, Wiltshire is Mid-Wessex, Bere Regis is King's-Bere of Tess, Bincombe Down cross roads is the scene of the military execution in A Melancholy Hussar. It is a true story, the deserters from the German Legion were shot in 1801 and are recorded in the parish register. Bindon Abbey is where Clare carried her. Bournemouth is Sandbourne of Hand of Ethelberta and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bridport is Port Bredy, Charborough House and its folly tower at 504638.75N, 267.09W is the model for Welland House in the novel Two on a Tower. Corfe Castle is the Corvsgate-Castle of Hand of Ethelberta. Cranborne Chase is The Chase scene of Tess's seduction. (Note - Bowerchalke on Cranborne Chase at 51030.75N, 15918.30W was the film location for the great fire in John Schlesinger's 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd.) Dorchester, Dorset is Casterbridge, the scene of Mayor of Casterbridge. Dunster Castle in Somerset is Castle De Stancy of A Laodicean. Fordington moor is Durnover moor and fields. Greenhill Fair near Bere Regis is Woodbury Hill Fair, Lulworth Cove is Lulstead Cove, Marnhull is Marlott of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Melbury House near Evershot is Great Hintock Court in A Group

of Noble Dames. Minterne is Little Hintock, Owermoigne is Nether Moynton in Wessex Tales.
Piddlehinton and Piddle Trenthide are the Longpuddle of A Few Crusted Characters. Puddletown Heath, Moreton Heath, Tincleton Heath and Bere Heath are Egdon Heath. Poole is Havenpool in Life's Little Ironies. Portland is the scene of The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. Puddletown is Weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd, River Frome valley is the scene of Talbothays dairy in Tess. Salisbury is Melchester in On the Western Circuit, Life's Little Ironies and Jude the Obscure etc. Shaftesbury is Shaston in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Sherborne is Sherton-Abbas, Sherborne Castle is home of Lady Baxby in A Group of Noble Dames. Stonehenge is the scene of Tess's apprehension. Sutton Poyntz is Overcombe. Swanage is the Knollsea of Hand of Ethelberta. Taunton is known as Toneborough in both Hardy's novels and poems (see http://www.wessex.me.uk/taunton.html). Wantage is Alfredston, of Jude the Obscure. Fawley, Berkshire is Marygreen of Jude the Obscure. Weyhill is Weydon Priors, Weymouth is Budmouth Regis, the scene of Trumpet Major & portions of other novels; Winchester is Wintoncester where Tess was executed. Wimborne is Warborne of Two on a Tower. Wolfeton House, near Dorchester is the scene of The Lady Penelope in a Group of Noble Dames. Woolbridge old Manor House, close to Wool station, is the scene of Tess's confession and honeymoon. In other literature Hardy provides the springboard for D. H. Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy (1936). Though this work became a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped significantly in the development of The Rainbow (1915, suppressed) and Women in Love (1920, private publication). Thomas Hardy's works feature prominently in the narrative in Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo, in which a graduate thesis analyzing Tess of the d'Urbervilles is interspersed with analysis of Matt's family's neuroses