Black Lamb

A Week in Literary History

June 2nd, 2002

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure, 1899) is born in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in 1840.

Thomas Hardy, b. June 2, 1840 d. 1928

Hardy’s novels made him famous and wealthy, and they’re worth reading for the depiction of his beloved fictional Wessex and for the fatalistic outlook he shared with other turn-of-the-century writers in England, France and the USA. Jude the Obscure is especially poetic and gloomy, almost impossibly so, but luckily for posterity it was Jude, or rather its poor reception by critics, that gave us perhaps Hardy’s most lasting legacy, his poetry, taken up again in middle age and pursued for the rest of his literary life, after the writing of novels (14 of them) had been put aside.

Suggested Reading Novels A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873. Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874. The Return of the Native, 1878. The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891. Jude the Obscure, 1895. Poetry Wessex Poems, 1898. Poems of the Past and Present, 1902. Satires of Circumstance, 1914. Moments of Vision, 1917. Collected Poems, 1930.

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