Hardy

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the Dorset village of Higher Bockhampton. Hardy began novel-writing in the hope that it might finance his transition from architect to poet. The first of his so-called Wessex novels, Far From the Madding Crowd, enabled him to fulfil that hope. A series of Wessex novels would follow, with the later ones (especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles) the subject of much adverse comment by Victorians offended by Hardy's liberal social attitudes. Hardy's work would continue to push the boundaries until his death in 1928.