Thomas Hardy’s ironic, pessimist novels explore life…

Thomas Hardy’s ironic, pessimist novels explore life in the English countryside.

Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticizes those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limit people's lives and cause unhappiness.

Fate or chance is another important theme. Hardy's characters often encounter crossroads on a journey, a junction that offers alternative physical destinations but which is also symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition, further suggesting that fate is at work.

Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, had failed to find a publisher.

He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future, so Hardy followed his advice and did not try further to publish it

He subsequently destroyed the manuscript, but used some of the ideas in his later work.

In his recollections in Life and Work, Hardy describes the book as "socialistic, not to say revolutionary; yet no argumentatively so."

After he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that he hoped would have more commercial appeal, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), both of which were published anonymously; it was while working on the latter that he met Emma Gifford, who would become his wife.

In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of Emma, was published under his own name.

A plot device popularized by Charles Dickens, the term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialized version of A Pair of Blue Eyes (published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff.

In his next novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy first introduced the idea of calling the region in the west of England, where his novels are set, Wessex.

Wessex had been the name of an early Saxon kingdom, in approximately the same part of England.

Far from the Madding Crowd had been successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career.

Over the ensuing twenty-five years Hardy has produced ten more novels.

The Hardys had moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878).

Hardy published Two on a Tower in 1882, a romance story set in the world of astronomy.

Then in 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother.

Here he had written The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which had attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication.

Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle classes.

Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, had met with an even stronger negative response from the Victorian public because of its controversial treatment of sex, religion and marriage.

Furthermore, its apparent attack on the institution of marriage has caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy is concerned that Jude the Obscure will be read as autobiographical.

Some booksellers had sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield, Walsham How, is reputed to have burnt his copy.

Despite this, Hardy will become a celebrity by the 1900s, but some argue that he gave up writing novels because of the criticism of both Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

The Well-Beloved, first serialized in 1892, is published in 1897.