Thomas Hardy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone. This is, quite accurately, a going to Nature ; yet the result is no mere photograph, but purely the product of the writer’s own mind."-- Thomas Hardy |
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Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June, 1840 – 11 January, 1928) was an English novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after the 1960s Movement.
Works
Prose
Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes:
Novels of Character and Environment
- The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
- The Return of the Native (1878)
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
- The Woodlanders (1887)
- Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories)
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
- Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories)
- Jude the Obscure (1895)
Romances and Fantasies
- A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
- The Trumpet-Major (1880)
- Two on a Tower (1882)
- A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories)
- The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).
Novels of Ingenuity
- Desperate Remedies (1871)
- The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
- A Laodicean (1881)
Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912-1913) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919-1920). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928-1930, as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, now published in a critical one-volume edition as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984).
Poetry (not a comprehensive list)
- The Photograph (1890)
- Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
- Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
- The Dynasts, Part 1 (1904)
- The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906)
- The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908)
- Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)
- Satires of Circumstance (1914)
- Moments of Vision (1917)
- Collected Poems (1919, part of the Mellstock Edition of his novels and poems)
- Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922)
- Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)
- Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928, published posthumously)
Drama