Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native – English – UGC NET – Notes

Thomas Hardy: Life and Works

• Except for the period in London during young manhood, Thomas Hardy lived his whole life near Dorchester, close to where he was born in 1840 and died in 1928. His personal experience was bound up with the people, customs, monuments, and institutions of Dorset and south-western England, which he placed permanently on the literary map as Wessex. As a writer, Hardy was a living paradox.
• A natural poet, much of his poetry is nevertheless in prose. He possessed the poet’s largeness, minuteness, and intensity of vision—displayed throughout his novels. The irony in his fiction is directed not at human egotism but at the very conditions of human existence. He saw his characters as elemental figures whose passions were doomed by fate.
• Hardy was neither a philosophical novelist nor a subtle psychologist. His prose often appears self-taught—sometimes clumsy, sometimes pretentious, generally rough-hewn. Yet his vision of life was genuine, and what Henry James called the “sense of felt life” is movingly present in his work.
• In his diary (1907), Hardy wrote: “Critics can never be made to understand that the failure may be greater than the success…”—a reflection of his belief in struggle and artistic integrity.
• Born at Higher Bockhampton to a master mason, Hardy was deeply influenced by his mother’s literary tastes. His early training as an architect gave him knowledge of local churches that enriched his writing. He married Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874. Moving to London at 22, he began writing poems idealizing rural life and came to see literature as his true vocation.
• His early novel Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) portrays idyllic rustic life. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) explores human emotions disrupted by misfortune and coincidence. The Return of the Native (1878) presents Egdon Heath as a symbol of indifferent nature and the stage for tragic passion. Characters such as Eustacia Vye and Clym Yeobright embody doomed desire and frustration. Actions rarely bring expected results; human will is overruled by impersonal fate.
• In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), nature, civilization, and character interact powerfully. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) shocked religious society, and Jude the Obscure (1896) provoked public outrage. Deeply affected, Hardy announced he would abandon fiction. He later reflected that the controversy cured him of further interest in novel-writing.
• Hardy devoted the rest of his life to poetry. Ford Maddox Ford described him as the ideal poet of a generation—passionate and learned. Though his marriage to Emma was unhappy and childless, and despite later marrying Florence Emily Dugdale, Hardy remained devoted to his art.
• He died on 11 January 1928 in Dorchester. Hardy was both a lyrical pastoralist and a modern, revolutionary writer. His pessimistic vision of life, paradoxically, continues to offer readers profound and lasting resonance.