Thomas Hardy was one of the most divisive voices of the Victorian age. Born in 1840 in the rural county of Dorset, England, three years after Queen Victoria took the throne, Hardy’s life and writing would encompass the Victorian age as well as the consciousness of the First World War. His father was a stonemason and builder, but also a fiddler, and the young Thomas was inspired at a young age by his father’s musicality. His mother, however, was the greatest influence on his literary future, inculcating an early love of reading in him, and becoming a life-long source of inspiration for the author’s understanding of women, as well as the relations between women and men of the time period.

Hardy’s first poems were rejected, and the young author soon turned to writing novels. The first novel to reach critical and popular success, Far From the Madding Crowd, was published in 1874. It was followed by numerous novels, including the greatly renowned Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Many of Hardy’s novels took place in the fictional region of Wessex, based on Dorset, for which he even designed a map, naming specific towns, often included in his books today.

Writing about love, morality, class struggle, the effects of industrialization, and the hardships and challenges facing women of the 19th century, Hardy illuminated the lives of common citizens through stories of extraordinary depth. Though many have called his novels “bleak” and considered him a pessimist for putting his characters through the harshest of situations and events, Hardy showed in each of his novels how resilient the human spirit is in the face of unspeakable tragedy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of his most ambitious works, unappreciated and even maligned during the author’s lifetime, presents the heinous ways in which women were viewed as “impure” after rape. Due to the novel’s explicitness (for its time), it was rejected by three publishers: the first two on account of the book’s “immorality,” and the last one because of its “succulence.” People were further enraged when Hardy subtitled the book “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.”

Though Tess was eventually published and a few more novels would be written, Hardy ultimately abandoned his fiction writing altogether after an overwhelming number of negative and mixed reviews of his work. It was then he turned back to poetry, his first literary love, and from 1898 until his death in 1928, wrote around one thousand poems. While today perhaps he is often remembered as a novelist, it was his overall love and skill for poetry that made him such a deft and talented writer. His poems were often dramatic scenes or short stories themselves. Some of his most famous poems include “The Ruined Maid,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” and his two famed war poems “Drummer Hodge,” and “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’.

Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874, and though she died in 1912 and he later remarried, her death would affect him for the rest of his life; he would write numerous poems about and dedicated to her. Having dictated his final poem to his second wife on his deathbed, Hardy died on January 11, 1928. Though his ashes were buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, his heart was interred with his first wife, Emma.