Thomas Hardy

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, is marked by imaginative poetic descriptions, and a foreboding sense of fatalism.   D.H. Lawrence greatly admired Hardy’s ability to ennoble the common man.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

It is Hardy's penultimate written novel. Though now considered to be a great classic of English literature, the book was poorly received at the time of its initial publication. The poignant portrait of heroine Tess illustrates Hardy's deep understanding of women.

The story concerns a simple country girl, Tess Durbeyfield, whose father's pretensions to social status lead her into the company of the nouveau-riche d'Urberville family. In a scene which suggests rape, though it is open to interpretation, Tess is made pregnant by the rakish Alec d'Urberville. Tess returns home in disgrace, but the child she bears soon dies, leaving her free to leave her village once again to look for work. While employed as a milkmaid, she encounters the morally upright Angel Clare, who falls in love with her. After their marriage, she is honest with him about her past; though Angel is educated, he remains basically naive, and cannot reconcile his real affection for Tess, his wounded pride, and his image of Tess as a semi-pagan Mary figure.

Abandoned by Angel, Tess is lured into a liaison with Alec d'Urberville, who comes back into her life by chance. When Alec lays eyes on Tess once more, he ruthlessly hunts her down, determined to win her back into his life of sin. Tess, influenced by her desprate situation and the perception that her husband will never rejoin her, yeilds to Alec's determination and allows him to support her while she lives with him. Eventually Angel returns, repentant, to reclaim her, and Tess murders Alec in order to be with her legal husband. They flee together, but the police catch up with them at Stonehenge, in a memorable finale. Tess is hanged for the murder of Alec.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

It is set in the fictional town of Casterbridge (based on the town of Dorchester in Dorset). Hardy subtitled the novel "The Life and Death of a Man of Character".

Under the influence of alcohol, Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, sells his wife and daughter in a country fair to a sailor. Once sober, he swears never to touch liquor again.

Eighteen years later, Henchard, now a successful grain merchant and the Mayor of Casterbridge, is reunited with Susan, the wife he gave away at a country fair. The return of his wife and daughter sets in motion a decline in his fortunes. The daughter, Elizabeth Jane, soon falls in love with Donald Farfrae, whom Henchard has employed as an assistant. Until his wife's death, Henchard is unaware that Elizabeth Jane is not his own child, but that of the man who "bought" Susan from him. He conceals the secret from her. His growing resentment of Donald Farfrae leads to his standing in the way of a marriage between Donald and Elizabeth Jane.

In the meantime, Henchard's former mistress, Lucetta, arrives in town, and attracts Donald, who marries her. Rumours spread of her previous relationship with Michael Henchard, and both are disgraced. Lucetta dies. When Newson, Elizabeth Jane's real father, returns, Henchard, afraid of losing her companionship, pretends she is dead. By the time Elizabeth Jane, now married to Donald Farfrae and reunited with Newson, goes looking for Henchard to forgive him, he has died.

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, first published in 1895.

Called "Jude the Obscene" by at least one reviewer, Jude the Obscure received so harsh a reception from scandalized critics that Hardy stopped writing fiction altogether, producing only poetry and drama for the rest of his life. It was first published under the title The Simpletons; and then Hearts Insurgent in the European and American editions of Harper's New Monthly Magazine

The novel is often thought of as Thomas Hardy's best work, not only for the elaborate structuring of the plot, where small and subtle details lead to the character's ruin, but in the themes of the book. Such themes include how human loneliness and sensuality can stop a person from trying to fulfill his dreams; how, when free from the trap of marriage, one's dreams will not be fulfilled if one is of a lower status; how the educated classes are often more like sophists than intellectuals; how living a libertine life full of integrity and passion will be condemned as scandalous in conservative society; and how religion is nothing but a mistaken sense that the tragedies that wear down an individual are the result of having sinned against a higher being.
As in most of Hardy's novels except, perhaps, for Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy manipulates the downfall of his characters like a sadistic god—as if he were a true believer in a deity that was not a redeemer but a cruel monster (a motif frequently called a "rigged doom").

The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, a stonemason who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on Oxford, England. Denied entry into the university, Jude is manipulated into an unwanted marriage with a country girl, Arabella, who soon deserts him. He becomes obsessed with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, even after she marries his former schoolteacher. Sue is attracted to the normalcy of her married life but quickly finds the relationship an unhappy one because, inherently, she is a libertine like Jude.

When Jude and Sue begin to live together, employers, who find out about this illicit relationship and its bastard children, dismiss Jude from his employment—and landlords continually evict them. Jude's eldest son (from his first marriage to Arabella), also called Jude but known as "Little Father Time", after observing the problems he and his siblings are causing their parents, hangs Sue's two children and then himself. The child leaves a pathetically misspelled note that reads: Done because we are too menny.

This tragedy ends Jude's relationship with Sue who returns to her first husband, Phillotson, after experiencing extreme religious guilt. After being tricked yet another time into remarrying Arabella, Jude falls ill and makes one last trip to Sue. Sue first confirms her intense love for him then leaves him forever, evincing the moral stranglehold of the church. Jude returns home and dies alone as Arabella is out courting his doctor.

Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd is a novel by 19th century English novelist Thomas Hardy, published in 1874. The title is apt, as the life of the book's heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, living in the quiet rural village of Weatherbury is indeed disrupted by the "madding crowd". After shunning the first man to love her, the shepherd Gabriel Oak, she is courted by two others: the lonely and repressed farmer Boldwood, and the charming but faithless Sergeant Troy. The role of fate is clearly established, with each twist and turn in the book being more luck than the choice of one of the characters. The book is widely seen as Hardy's first masterpiece.

Hardy's Poetry

Though known to us primarily as a novelist, Hardy was in fact a rather accomplished (and good) poet, and a poem of his may appear on the GRE.

“The Darkling Thrush”

I leant upon a coppice gate
   When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
   The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
   Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
   Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
   The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
   The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
   Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
   Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
   The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
   Of joy illimited;
An agèd thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
   In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
   Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

From: “Channel Firing”

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worm drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God cried, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . . .