In the mid-1860s, financial difficulties forced him away from the idea of university and he became a priest in the Anglican church. Famous for his novels, Hardy is considered by many to be an important novelist of the 19th century, as well as an important poet of the 20th century.
He was born on June 2, 1840, on a farm in the town of Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in Dorset, England.
He completed his education in his hometown and, learning his father's trade as a builder, became an apprentice to an architect from Dorchester at the age of sixteen.
In 1862 he went to London to work with architect Arthur Blomfield. He started writing poems and essays during this period. In 1867, he returned to his hometown to become an assistant to architect John Hicks, where he wrote his first unpublished novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1868).
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
While he was a journeyman architect, he met Emma Gifford, whom he would marry in 1874, in St Juliet, during a trip to Cornwall. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published in 1871.
This was followed by A Pair of Blue Eyes (1874), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), and The Hand of Ethelberta (1876).
From the late 1870s, Hardy joined London literary circles with his wife; He wrote Homecoming (1878), The Trumpet-Major (1880), A Laodicean (1881), and Two on a Tower (1882). When his house, which he named "Max Gate" near Dorchester, was completed in 1885, he settled back in his hometown and wrote his most famous novels during this period: Life's Little Ironies (1884), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); The Woodworkers (1887), Wessex Tales (1888), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), A Group of Noble Dames (1891) and The Well-Beloved (1897).
After the negative reaction he received to his novel An Unnamed Jude, which he wrote in 1895, he quit writing as a novelist and returned to poetry, which he continued throughout his life.
Hardy wrote over nine hundred poems in the remaining thirty years of his life; He believed that he could best express his ideas in poetry.
He captured an impressive and original voice both in his poems and in his play The Dynasts, which he wrote during this period.
He received the Order of Merit from George V in 1910.
In 1912 his wife Emma died suddenly; This event caused Hardy to write his most beautiful love poems.
Two years after Emma's death, Hardy married Florence Dugdale. Hardy, considered among the most respected literary figures of his country, died in Max Gate on January 11, 1928. His ashes are buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.