Thomas Hardy

British · b. 1840

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet whose tragic fiction, set in the half-imaginary rural county of Wessex, indicted Victorian hypocrisy and the cruelty of fate. After the fierce backlash against Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, he abandoned novels for poetry, at which he was equally masterful, for the rest of his long life.