Short biography of thomas hardy

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He grew to be a small man only a little over five feet tall. Hardy's poetry, like his late novels, is remarkably modern. Angel abandons Tess and tells her she cannot contact him; he will contact her. In 1910 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Merit.

After her death Hardy wrote a poem pervaded with personal memories, entitled “Thoughts of Phena”.

First novels

Under the inspiration of George Meredith’s prose, Hardy began to write his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, which he submitted to the publishing house of Alexander Macmillan. His father was a stonemason and builder, and his mother instilled in him a love of storytelling.

He may have been the inspiration for Hardy to start writing poetry on a similar theme.

Hardy’s architectural apprenticeship, which lasted a little more than four years, provided him with important experiences which would later inform his fiction and poetry. Disgusted with the public reception of two of his mature works, Hardy gave up writing novels altogether.

The detailed description of the Vale of Blackmoor isn’t just setting a scene; it’s a portrait of a place Hardy knew intimately, a place that felt real to him, and therefore, feels real to the reader. A barren landscape might symbolize emotional desolation, while a blooming garden might represent hope and renewal. The Hardys were an old Dorset family, which had descended from the Le Hardy family residing in the Isle of Jersey since the 15th century.

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man.New York: Penguin Press, 2007.

Turner, Paul. Hardy saw the historic Field of Waterloo, where Napoleon was defeated. In the third phase (1898-1928), the period of the writer’s rising fame, he abandoned writing novels and returned to poetry.

Childhood and youth

Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in a brick and thatch two-storey cottage in the hamlet called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, about three miles east of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset.

A Critical Biography. Following the appearance Charles Darwin'sOrigin of Species (1859), Hardy increasingly adopted a deterministic view of life, observing in 1901 that "non-rationality seems… to be the [guiding] principle of the Universe." Tragic and self-destructive fates seem to haunt Hardy's characters.

His poetry was not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels had been, but critical response to Hardy's poetry has warmed considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence of Philip Larkin. However, after giving up the novel in adulthood, Hardy published a collection of his earlier poems under the title Wessex Poems (1898).

Between 1903 and 1908 Hardy wrote mostly in blank verse a great panorama of the Napoleonic wars, the epic drama The Dynasts.

His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished in 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. He wasn’t simply telling stories, he was crafting worlds that felt both familiar and hauntingly remote.