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Son of a mason, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born near many of his novels. At 16, he was apnticed to a local architect. Six years later he went to London to work for a famous architect. During his spare time, he studied widely: language, literature, history, philosophy and art, and he even won two prizes for essays on architectural subjects. But architecture was never his desired profession. Soon he was writing poetry; when that failed, he began to write novels. In 1871, his first novel Desperate Remedies was published and well received. However, the real success came with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 finally enabled him to give up architecture for writing. In the following twenty-three years he produced over ten local-colored novels until 1896 when he was tired of all those hostile criticisms against his last two novels: Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896). From then on, Hardy abandoned novel-writing and returned to his first love -- poetry. Of the eight volumes by Hardy -- 918 poems in all – the most famous is The Dynasts, a long epic-drama about the Napoleonic Wars. On January 11, 1928, this last important novelist and poet of the 19th century died. He was buried with imssive ceremonies in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Hardy's novels are all Victorian in date. Most of them are set in Wessex, the fictional primitive and crude rural region which is really the home place he both loves and hates. They are known for the vivid description of the vicissitudes of people who live in an agricultural setting menaced by the forces of invading capitalism. His best local-colored works are his later ones, such as The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet Major (1880), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. These works, known as "novels of character and environment," are the most resentative of him as both a naturalistic and a critical realist writer.

Among Hardy's major works,  Under the Greenwood Tree is the most cheerful and idyllic.  In Far from the Madding Crowd, the world is still a balanced one. However, from The Return of the Native on, the tragic sense becomes the keynote of his novels. The conflict between the traditional and the modern is brought to the center of the stage. In The Return of the Native, the restless Eustacia tries to find a way out of the wild, dull, and backward rural life by marrying a man who is just back from the modern outside world. But at last she is disappointed because this man has returned to settle down in the country. She tries to flee but is drowned in a big storm. Another novel The Mayor of Casterbridge reveals the conflict in a deeper and fuller sense. The hero Henchard is a self-sufficient man, who, by nature, belongs to the old rural culture. He does business and carries out his mayor's duty in an old-fashioned way. His rival Farfrae is a decent and shrewd merchant, a modern man in every sense. Finally Henchard, as a matter of course, is defeated by Farfrae just as the vulnerable rural life-style is uprooted by the industrialization. The readers' sympathy, however, is directed to Henchard, the loser. They are touched by the integrity and fullness of his being. This conflict between the old and the modern becomes more intense in the last two novels. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess, a simple, innocent and faithful country girl, is at odds with the world which invents trains and machines as well as the nouveau riche like Alec; she finally becomes a victim of the modern society. The tragic sense turns into despair in Jude the Obscure, where cornered by the traditional social morality, the hero and the heroine have to kill their own will and passion and return to their former destructive way of life.

Living at the turn of the century, Hardy is often regarded transitional writer. In him we see the influence from both the past and the modern. AS some people put it, he is intellectually advanced and emotionally traditional. In his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining and disappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with those traditional characters he is always sympathetic. On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries and modern philosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious, too. He read Darwin's The Origin of Species and accepted the idea of "survival of the.fittest." He was also influenced by Spencer's The First Principle, which led him to the belief that man's fate is determinedly tragic, driven by a combined force of "nature," both inside and outside. In his works, man is shown inevitably bound by his own inherent nature and hereditary traits which prompt him to go and search for some specific happiness or success and set him in conflict with the environment. The outside nature -- the natural environment or Nature herself -- is shown as some mysterious supernatural force, very powerful but half-blind, impulsive and uncaring to the inspanidual's will, hope, passion or suffering. It likes to play practical jokes upon human beings by producing a series of mistimed actions and unfortunate coincidences. Man proves impotent before Fate, however he tries, and he seldom escapes his ordained destiny.  This pessimistic view of life dominates most of Hardy's later works and earns him a reputation as a naturalistic writer.

Though Naturalism seems to have played an important part in Hardy's works, there is also bitter and sharp criticism and even open challenge of the irrational, hypocritical and unfair Victorian institutions, conventions and morals which strangle the inspanidual will and destroy natural human emotions and relationships. The conflicts between the traditional and the modern, between the old rural value of respectability and honesty and the new utilitarian commercialism, between the old, false social moral and the natural human passion, etc. are all closely set in a realistic background true to the very time and the very place.

And yet, Hardy is not an analyst of human life or nature like George Eliot, but a meditative story-teller or romancer. He tells very good stories about very interesting people but seldom stops to ask why. He is a great painter of nature. In his hand, nature assumes the form of life and becomes a most powerful, forbidding force with its own life and will. His heroes and heroines, those unfortunate young men and women in their desperate struggle for personal fulfillment and happiness, are all vividly and realistically depicted. They all seem to possess a kind of exquisitely sensuous beauty. They are not only inspanidual cases but also of universal truth. Their plight is not just their own; it applies to any one, any age. And finally, all the works of Hardy are noted for the rustic dialect and a poetic flavor which fits well into their perfectly designed architectural structures. They are the product of a conscientious artist.