Thomas Hardy

English novelist and poet (1840–1928), author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge — fiction remembered for its pessimism, its fatalism, and its unusually close attention to the women in its plots.

The biographer Paula Byrne, whose 2024 book Hardy Women traces his life through the women around him, reads Hardy’s fiction as inseparable from his two marriages. His tragic doublings — pairs of women, pairs of men, mirrored fates — trace, in her account, to a man perpetually pursuing ‘the unattainable’, a pattern she finds stated most nakedly in his novel The Well-Beloved, about a sculptor who repeatedly falls for a succession of women embodying the same unreachable ideal. Hardy fell back in love with his first wife, Emma, only after her death, having by then already installed his second wife, Florence, in the household — behaviour Byrne calls ‘a little perverse’, reading his late, maudlin poems to Emma as both genuine remorse and a working writer’s recognition of good material. Byrne locates Hardy’s most Shakespearean quality not in style but in a shared fatalism — ‘a divinity that rough-hews our ends’ — the sense of a peevish, indifferent providence governing Tess of the d’Urbervilles much as it governs King Lear.

In the wiki

• Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth — Byrne discusses Hardy’s marriages, his fixation on unattainable women, the class-inflected taboo against divorce underlying Jude the Obscure, and his deliberate use of doubled characters and mirrored plots as a way of exploring counterfactual lives. She also recommends his lesser-read work — the novel Two on a Tower and his early poetry, written at 25 and, in her view, startlingly modern in voice, against Hardy’s popular reputation as staid.

See also

• Hardy Women — Paula Byrne’s group biography of the women in his life
• Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth — the episode