Creator / Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet.
Hardy is known as a realist, portraying the lives of his characters as realistically as possible, with a minimum of judgment. In this respect, he is considered a disciple of George Eliot
; his no-drama style and his fairly neutral stance (for his day) on sexual matters can also be compared to Gustave Flaubert
. Particularly like Eliot, most of his novels focused on everyday life of ordinary people in rural England; he developed a realistic but completely fictional version
of his native West Country
as a setting for his novels. However, he had a sense for the poetic in language and description heavily influenced by Romantics, particularly Wordsworth
, which can be seen throughout his work.
Works by Thomas Hardy with their own pages:
Thomas Hardy's work provides examples of:
- Downer Ending: Things don't tend to end well in Hardy novels.
- The Lost Lenore: Most of Hardy's poetry is inspired by his first wife, Emma. In a cruel twist of irony, he neglected her for his work while she was alive.
- The West Country: The setting for most of his novels is in a fictionalised version.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Hardy was an adherent of fatalism, which stated that everything was fated and any attempts to avert it would just cause the fate in question to happen more painfully. This tended to lead to a Downer Ending, as noted above.