Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Upper Bockhampton, not far from Dorchester, in Dorsetshire, southern England. The son of Thomas Hardy, a master mason or building contractor, and Jemima Hand, a woman of some literary interests. Hardy's formal education consisted of about eight years in local schools. He was bright enough so that, by this time, he'd read a good deal in English, French, and Latin on his own. Later, in London, he made his own rather careful study of painting and English poetry. He was also interested in music and learned to play the violin. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to an architect in Dorchester and remained in that profession, later in London and then again in Dorchester, for almost twenty years.
He began to write poetry during this time, but none of it was published. His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, written in 1867–68, was never published. Although the manuscript did not survive, Hardy used parts of it in other books. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. The first novel to appear in installments in a magazine before publication as a book, an arrangement he was to follow for the rest of his novels, was A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873.
Hardy's real fame as a novelist, along with sufficient income to let him abandon architecture for good, came with Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874. On September 17, 1874, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford.
From this time on, Hardy devoted his full time to writing, continuing to publish novels regularly until his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895. Among these are some of the best of his so-called Wessex novels (Hardy uses the name of one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain to designate an area including his native Dorsetshire): The Return of the Native, 1878; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886; The Woodlanders, 1887; Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891; in addition to Jude. To this list of best should be added the earlier Far from the Madding Crowd.
