Thomas Hardy’s World: The Life, Times and Works of the Great Novelist and Poet

UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are just some of the works of Thomas Hardy, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers.

His “novels of character and environment” set against the Wessex backdrop evoke a lost England, bringing to life its rural past. Hardy’s world is a land of maypoles and mummers, of strange superstitions and of village fairs and market days, with the machinery of the industrial age beginning to take hold. He also created some of literature’s more memorable characters including the passionate, doomed figures of Tess Durbeyfield and Jude Fawley, capricious Bathsheba Everdene and the drunken wife-seller, Michael Henchard.

This book captures the essence of Hardy – the myths that surround his life, his influences and the scandalous reputation he had in his day as a writer whose main themes were thought to be “Sex and Wessex”. It also tells us what Hardy means in the 1990s – from Hardy Country, to the acclaimed screen adaptations of his work, and his place as a great writer in the literary canon.