Books Written by Thomas Hardy

Twenty-seven are listed on this page: his 14 novels, from Desperate Remedies (1871) to The Well-Beloved (1897), four short story collections, eight collections of poems and the verse drama The Dynasts. An earlier novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was never published and the manuscript was destroyed.

The novels: Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-Major (1880), A Laodicean (1881), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) and The Well-Beloved (1897).

With Far from the Madding Crowd (1874): it is his first success, it introduces Wessex, and it ends less darkly than the later novels. If you want something shorter first, try Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the story of a country girl destroyed by two men and by the moral rules of her time. Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge are close behind.

Jude the Obscure (1895) caused an uproar: one reviewer called it “Jude the Obscene”, some booksellers sold it in brown paper, and the Bishop of Wakefield, Walsham How, is reputed to have burned his copy. Hardy published no new novel afterwards. Critics still disagree on whether the attacks drove him out of fiction; in 1928 he told The Bookman he had “written quite enough novels”.

His fictional region of south-west England, centred on Dorset, named after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Real places appear under other names: Casterbridge is Dorchester, Budmouth is Weymouth, Christminster is Oxford.

Yes. He published his first book of poems, Wessex Poems, in 1898, after his last novels, and seven more collections, ending with Winter Words (1928), which appeared after his death. Satires of Circumstance (1914) contains the poems he wrote after the death of his first wife, Emma, in 1912.

Among others: Far from the Madding Crowd (1967, John Schlesinger; 2015, Thomas Vinterberg), Tess (1979, Roman Polanski), Jude (1996, Michael Winterbottom), The Woodlanders (1997, Phil Agland) and The Claim (2000), a western loosely based on The Mayor of Casterbridge.

He died at Max Gate, his house outside Dorchester, on 11 January 1928, aged 87. He wanted to be buried at Stinsford; as a compromise his heart was buried there with his first wife, Emma, and his ashes were placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

In effect. The Early Life of Thomas Hardy (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930) were published under the name of his second wife, Florence, but the first volume was largely written by Hardy himself.

An English novelist and poet (1840–1928), the son of a Dorset stonemason, who trained as an architect before he wrote 14 novels set in his fictional Wessex. After the outcry over Jude the Obscure he gave up fiction and spent his last thirty years writing poetry.

In a cottage at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester in Dorset, on 2 June 1840. He worked in London as an architect’s assistant from 1862 to 1867, then went back to Dorset. From 1885 until his death he lived at Max Gate, the house outside Dorchester that he designed himself and his brother built. Both his birthplace, Hardy’s Cottage, and Max Gate belong to the National Trust.

Yes. He wrote under his own name, which he shared with his father. His first books did appear without it, though: Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously, and Far from the Madding Crowd first ran unsigned in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874, when some critics thought it might be by George Eliot.

Less than his reputation suggests. The sentences are plain; what slows readers down is the Dorset dialect in the dialogue, the long passages about landscape and farm work, and the coincidences his plots turn on. The early novels are the gentlest way in: Under the Greenwood Tree is short and comic, and Far from the Madding Crowd ends happily. Jude the Obscure is the bleakest.

The last novel he wrote was Jude the Obscure (1895). The last one to come out as a book was The Well-Beloved (1897), a revised version of a story he had serialised in 1892 as The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved.

Yes, collected in four books: Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), which includes the linked tales “A Few Crusted Characters”, and A Changed Man (1913). You will find them in the bibliography below the novels.

More than 900, in eight collections published between Wessex Poems (1898) and Winter Words (1928). Most of them were written after he gave up novels, in his sixties, seventies and eighties.

Time, loss and chance, above all. Many look back at love that is gone, like “A Broken Appointment” and the poems he wrote after his first wife, Emma, died in 1912, such as “Where the Picnic Was”. Others turn a dry irony on death, as in “Are You Digging on My Grave?”, or on war, as in “A Wife in London”, in which a woman receives her husband’s cheerful letter from the Boer War the day after the telegram announcing his death.

He grew up in the Church of England and as a young man thought of becoming a clergyman. Reading Darwin and other scientific writers ended his orthodox faith, and he is usually described as an agnostic. He kept a deep attachment to church music and ritual, though, and his poem “The Oxen” is about wanting to believe again.

Not in name, but his novels take women’s side against the rules of their time: Tess of the d’Urbervilles is subtitled “A Pure Woman”, and Jude the Obscure attacks the marriage laws. In 1906 he wrote to the suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett that he had “for a long time been in favour of woman-suffrage”. Critics still disagree about how he portrays women.

No. He never served, and he was 74 when the First World War began. But war runs through his work: The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts are set during the Napoleonic Wars, and poems such as “Drummer Hodge” and “A Wife in London” came out of the Boer War.

At home at Max Gate, on 11 January 1928, aged 87, after falling ill in December. His death certificate gives cardiac syncope, with old age as a contributing factor.

Not as far as is known; the actor only shares the name. Thomas Hardy had no children, so there are no direct descendants.

As a novelist, to George Eliot: both wrote about English country life, but Hardy is darker and more fatalistic. As a poet, he is often seen as a bridge between the Victorians and the twentieth century, and Philip Larkin was one of his great admirers.