Tomas Gardi

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist, short-story writer, and poet.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840. His village consisted of only eight houses inhabited by laborers. Hardy’s father, like his own father before him, worked as a stonemason and builder. Thomas, together with his two sisters and a brother, grew up in an isolated rural area.

Thomas’s mother, who could read but could not write, decided that her son deserved a better education than the one she herself had received. Compulsory education did not exist in those years, and many rural children grew up without learning to read or write. Thomas was an exception: at the age of nine he was sent to the parish school in Dorchester. His classmates considered Thomas modest and “unsociable.” Thomas’s education continued after school as well — his mother insisted that he read many “good” books.

At 16, Thomas finished school. Always interested in building, he decided to begin a career as an architect. For five years he trained at a Dorchester firm before moving to London in 1862. There he was taken on by the enterprising architect Arthur Blomfield, from whom he learned the art of church restoration. In London Hardy also studied painting and taught himself Greek and Latin, from five to eight in the morning every day. By 1867, when Hardy returned to Dorchester to work on designing and restoring churches, he had already begun writing novels. Desperate Remedies was published in 1871. A year earlier he had met his future wife Emma in Cornwall, whom he married in 1874.

They lived together in Dorset and London for ten years, during which Hardy became a professional writer. He made his name as a writer thanks to Far from the Madding Crowd.

By 1885 Hardy had earned enough to move back to Dorchester permanently. There he built a house, Max Gate, for himself and Emma (they had no children). Beginning in 1887, he turned to writing short stories, drawing their plots from Dorset life. By then his name was well known in literary circles, and London magazines paid well for the publication of his stories. They were collected and published in three volumes: Wessex Tales