Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote about social suffering, sexual freedom, exploitation, disbelief, and the courage and honesty to face the worst.

He intimately and dynamically engaged with the worlds of politics, ideas and culture, as well as the world of rural Wessex, fusing a powerfully localised imagination with a cosmopolitan intellect.

His life spanned the rise and decline of industrial Britain, and the march of human progress into the devastation of the Great War.

Hardy was the last great Victorian, striking a chord with contemporaries, such as Tennyson and Browning, and influencing modernists such as Woolf and D H Lawrence.