Major novels:
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891),
Jude the Obscure (1895)

Biographical notes

Hardy, son of a musically-minded stonemason and a mother whose love of books profoundly influenced his own, was trained in architecture, a career he followed in London and his native Dorset into his early thirties. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, reached publication in 1871, and the popular success of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 allowed Hardy to drop architecture and write professionally full-time. Over the next two decades Hardy published a dozen novels that brought him both fame, and especially with Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, some measure of infamy for "immorality and pessimism" in his frank treatment of sexual matters and his forthright depiction of religious doubts. Exasperated with hostile criticism of these last two novels, Hardy turned almost exclusively to writing poetry for the rest of his life. In addition to the novels, Hardy published more than 40 short stories and 1000 poems: during his lifetime, Hardy was admired more for his novels than his poetry, though in the years following his death Hardy's poetry came to be considered more important than his fiction. Over his career spanning six decades Hardy's fundamental outlook on life remained remarkably consistent, though with the sharp division of his literary output between fiction and poetry at the turn of the twentieth century, he successfully straddled two widely different literary periods as a Victorian novelist and an early modernist poet.

Local color

The vast majority of Hardy's fiction and much of his poetry is set in Wessex, a fictional region of southwestern England clearly based on Hardy's native county of Dorset. "Local color writing" is predominantly considered an American concern of the late 19th century, but Hardy clearly works in this vein of realistic and informative presentation of a community inhabiting a particular geographic region, with the characteristic features of local color writing in attention to dialect, regional manners, mores, beliefs and superstitions, and eccentric characters.

A tiny hint of modernism

Hardy is most assuredly a traditional late-Victorian novelist in nearly all respects (including frequent and heavy-handed commentary upon his characters in narrative discourse), but he anticipates modernist novelists such as James Joyce in opening up the subject matter of fiction to include important aspects of life not often considered "appropriate" or "decent" in his time. Joyce would go much further than Hardy in portraying in Ulysses, with detail, such admittedly real but not typically acknowledged aspects of life as Leopold Bloom's "constitutional" morning bowel movement or his masturbating later in the day, and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover would portray quite vividly sexual intercourse between a married woman and her working class lover. Hardy comes nowhere near these extremes in having art mirror aspects of life generally deemed indecent or unacceptable by publishers and the public in the 1890s, but in two essays, "The Profitable Reading of Fiction" (1888) and "Candour in English Fiction" (1890), he argued that novelists had "the right to treat controversial topics with the same sincerity as is permitted in private intercourse, to discuss candidly the sexual relation, the problems of religious belief, and the position of man in the universe" (Baugh 1467). In the serial publication of the Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy had to remove certain portions of the narrative that were considered too racy or morally offensive, and when he restored them to the novel for initial publication in book form, many were outraged.

Agnosticism, irony-tinged pessimism, and naturalism

In his youth Hardy thought of pursuing a vocation in the church; most of his architectural work involved repair or design of churches, and throughout his life Hardy was drawn to religious music. But like many in the latter decades of the 19th century, he was impacted greatly by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) and could never accept belief in the God of Christianity. Hardy was not an atheist but an agnostic, believing that humanity was incapable of understanding whatever force might have created us or that oversees our lives in some fashion—in his poetry he notes an "Immanent Will." Hardy was more of a "secular humanist," believing that the human senses and reason do not support arguments for or against religious beliefs.

Throughout his fiction and poetry Hardy portrays characters apparently thwarted by fate. In some works—Tess, for instance—the outcome is downright tragic, and contemporary critics of Hardy's fiction condemned him a pessimist, though he rejected this label and insisted he was a "meliorist," one who believes human effort can make the world a better place. This attitude is more apparent in his poetry and in fiction other than in Tess (the short story "On the Western Circuit," for instance), but Hardy's characteristic attitude towards the harshness of ultimate circumstances, or "fate," was typically not bitterness or despair, but rather a wry, shoulder-shrugging acceptance.

Hardy classified Tess of the D'Urbervilles and roughly half of his other fiction as "Novels of Character and Environment." A common theme in all his literary output was described by poet and critic Laurence Binyon as "the implanted crookedness of things," or, more precisely, "the struggle of [humanity] against the indifferent force that rules the world and inflicts on him the sufferings and ironies of life and love" (Drabble 433). Hardy expresses his fundamental view in the 1892 preface to Tess in quoting Shakespeare's King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport." Hardy is perhaps the most prominent British writer in the mode of naturalism, the literary movement in the late 19th century and early 20th in which writers essentially applied "principles of scientific determinism to literature. . . . The naturalistic view of human beings is that of animals in the natural world, responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, none of which they can control or understand" (Harmon and Holman 329-30). The spirit of scientific determinism reflected in works of naturalism in the 19th century was abundantly evident in the works of Darwin, theorizing the mechanism of biological evolution, in Karl Marx, describing history as a "battleground of economic and social forces," and Sigmund Freud, viewing human psychology as explained by inner and even subconscious forces (Harmon and Holman 330).

Themes and motifs to consider as you read:

Fundamental distinctions between morality and religion

Hardy took the novel's subtitle seriously: consider how Tess is a "Pure woman, faithfully represented."

Local color: descriptive detail in portraying the lives of the working class in rural Wessex

Tess's active role in her own fate: she makes choices for herself and is not exclusively a victim

Tess: guilt vs. "injured innocence"

The changing social order in late Victorian England: the decay or degeneration of aristocratic families and the rise of the bourgeois class that can usurp ancestral names and set up as country gentry

Modern industrial mechanization, in railroads, e.g., and especially in the nightmarish description of the threshing machine

Close descriptions of nature, often with clearly symbolic intent

Religious doubt and loss of faith in the orthodox Christian God, in Tess, Alec, and Angel all three