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.

While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). However, beginning in the 1950s Hardy has been recognised as a major poet; he had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s.

Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.



Contents
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Far From the Madding Crowd
The Return of the Native
A Pair of Blue Eyes
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Life's Little Ironies
A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters
Desperate Remedies
The Dynasts
An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes
A Group of Noble Dames
Jude the Obscure
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
The Woodlanders (1887)
Wessex Tales (1888)
The Dynasts (1904)
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1899)
The Well-Beloved (1897)
Two on a Tower (1882)
The Trumpet-Major (1880)
A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913)
A Laodicean (1881)
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid (1883)
The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters
Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces (1914)
Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917)

A Laodicean (1881)
A vacillating young woman is thrust onto the horns of religious and romantic dilemmas.