About Thomas Hardy

I first read Hardy nearly twenty years ago, as a somewhat younger man then, and recently it felt like it was time to revisit him as he had left a favourable impression. So over the last year I have re-read all of Thomas Hardy’s major novels plus a few I hadn’t read before.

Hardy appeals to me as a novelist who combines straight old-fashioned good story-telling with quite a modern sensibility. This mixture of old and modern is typical of the late 19th century in which he lived. He writes of Wessex, a rural England which he is all too aware is in the process of disappearing with the coming of a more urban age and advance of the railways. He also describes a society still suffering under the constraints of a prudish Victorian morality of which he clearly disapproves and which to the modern reader may now seem ridiculous.

Hardy sets his novels in Wessex, a fictionalized South West of England in which, though the place names are changed, the locations are recognizable. It’s the area where Hardy grew up and later chose to spend most of his life: it’s the area and environment he knows best and can describe most accurately. Wessex takes many different forms: from the various lush and harsh agricultural landscapes of “Tess of the d’Urbevilles” and “Far from the madding crowd”, to the brooding Egdon Heath of “Return of the Native”, to the provincial towns of “Jude the Obscure” and “Mayor of Casterbridge”, to the woods of “the Woodlanders”, to the coastal watering holes of “the Trumpet Major” and windswept cliffs of “A pair of blue eyes” - to name but a few of the settings. All of these Hardy describes with consummate mastery and a fine eye for the changing details of nature through the seasons. He typically begins by painting a broad sweep of landscape in which human beings first appear as a detail: man is shaped by his environment, which is one of the many forces of fate that bear down on him. One of the sheer pleasures of re-reading Hardy is to savour the beauty of the descriptive passages.

While Hardy lovingly describes farming before mechanization, celebrates old countryside festive traditions, such as dancing and play-acting, and likes to play up a certain rustic charm among the minor characters, Wessex is no rural idyll. There is grinding poverty, drudgery, ignorance, strict class divisions, injustice, dishonesty, eviction, adultery, rape, unwanted pregnancy, drunkenness and so on. Basically all of human life is here. Hardy’s characters are drawn from ordinary rural folk and yet act out the great dramas of human existence.

The greatest of these is of course love, or more accurately sexual attraction between men and women. If you read a lot of Hardy novels one after another, you come to see that the fundamental plot of many is the same: A loves B; B loves C; C loves D. Somewhere along that chain marriages are concluded (often willed by would-be social-climber parents) and usually work out badly as it’s not the outcome one of the two really wanted. Hardy may be forever writing love stories, but he doesn’t do happy endings. He continues to tell the difficult story of what happens after two people get married and try to live together, he doesn’t sentimentally stop at “A married B and they lived happily ever after”, because C and D are still in the picture. Hardy tells the truth (or at least his own from experience) that many marriages are unhappy, and let’s not forget that in those days you were generally stuck in them. Much of the unhappiness can also be attributed to the constraining morality of Victorian society, most notably in “Tess” and “Jude”. This society is described by him as contradicting the natural order of things, thereby making his heroines and heroes unnecessarily miserable.
The increasingly hostile reception of these late novels by (a perhaps hypocritically) offended society led Hardy to give up writing in the genre and to concentrate on poetry and verse drama.

The constraints of society and its conventional morality are but one more of the forces of fate working against us. As a young man Hardy lost his faith in a beneficent God and came to see life more as does Gloucester in “King Lear”:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods -
they kill us for their sport”

Hardy writes a great story that keeps you turning the pages. His plots are characterized by unexpected twists and yet they are borne along by an inexorable logic which is rooted in the personality of his characters whose psychology he draws so convincingly. Even if sometimes you find yourself willing them to speak up for once instead of suffering in silence out of timidity, or to stay just a bit longer so as not to miss someone, so that the crisis might be avoided, the whole point is that fate has ordained it to turn out this way, however stupid, pointless or ironic it may seem. Hardy called one of his sets of short stories “Life’s little ironies”, where he treats this kind of situation in more comic vein, but mainly his novels are a tragic depiction of life’s great ironies.

And yet for all that, I wouldn’t describe Hardy’s novels as depressing. There is something uplifting in the long-suffering tenacity and unconventional virtue of the repeatedly wronged Tess. Even Henchard, who in the brilliant opening scene of “the Mayor of Casterbridge” starts the action by the most despicable act of selling his wife, somehow manages to earn our sympathy by trying to reform but ultimately failing because he cannot escape his past and the flaws in his character that made it.

Hardy gives us an insight into human nature and relations that transcends the rural setting of Wessex making his stories still ring true in our modern age. Most often in Hardy’s novels things don’t work out as his characters hoped and planned, which often is the way in real life. Yet even so there is a force in them that suggests life is worth living all the same.