Thomas Hardy – An overview
This information is largely taken from Wikipedia
Copyright on Hardy’s works
By the terms of the Berne Convention, all of Hardy’s published works became public domain in December 1978, 50 years after his death. The Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act of 1988 extended the period of expiration, but only to 70 years, so Hardy’s writings remain out of copyright.
Thomas Hardy OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy’s poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy’s Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south-central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read.
Influence
Hardy corresponded with and visited Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey and many of Lady Catherine’s books are inspired by Hardy, who was very fond of her.
D. H. Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy (1936) indicates the importance of Hardy for him, even though this work is a platform for Lawrence’s own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study. The influence of Hardy’s treatment of character, and Lawrence’s own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy’s novels, helped significantly in the development of The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920).
Wood and Stone (1915), the first novel by John Cowper Powys, who was a contemporary of Lawrence, was “Dedicated with devoted admiration to the greatest poet and novelist of our age Thomas Hardy”. Powys’s later novel Maiden Castle (1936) is set in Dorchester, Hardy’s Casterbridge, and was intended by Powys to be a “rival” to Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Maiden Castle is the last of Powys’s so-called Wessex novels, Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), and Weymouth Sands (1934), which are set in Somerset and Dorset.
Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale (1930). Thomas Hardy’s works also feature prominently in the American playwright Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985), in which a graduate thesis analysing Tess of the d’Urbervilles is interspersed with analysis of Matt’s family’s neuroses.
The symphonic poems Mai-Dun by John Ireland (1921) and Egdon Heath by Gustav Holst (1927) evoke the landscape of Hardy’s novels.
Hardy has been a significant influence on Nigel Blackwell, frontman of the post-punk British rock band Half Man Half Biscuit, who has often incorporated phrases (some obscure) by or about Hardy into his song lyrics.
