First published in 1940 and revised in 1965, this work by the distinguished Hardy Scholar, Carl J. Weber, traces Hardy’s literary career from High Brockhampton to the grave in Poet’s corner, Westminster Abbey. Using a multitude of letters, it explains why Thomas Hardy wrote, and how his books grew from ideas, emotions and experiences to the printed volumes that have delighted the world. This book will be of interest to those studying the works of Thomas Hardy and 19th century literature.

Thomas Hardy's fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and his poetry has been acclaimed as among the most influential of the twentieth century. His work still creates passionate advocacy and opposition. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy is an essential introduction to this most enigmatic of writers. These commissioned essays from an international team of contributors comprises a general overview of all Hardy' s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy's ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy's biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Hardy's writing is also analysed against developments in contemporary critical theory and issues such as sexuality and gender. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy's life and publications, and a guide to further reading.

Born and brought up in a village-tradesman family, he broke away, re-inventing himself first as a professional architect, and then as a successful man of letters. The imagined societies of his rural novels are significantly selective: he ignores, marginalizes, or treats dismissively the mass of rural poor, the agricultural labourers, whose condition was a running concern of the nineteenth century. His novels focus on the independent group to which his family belonged: 'an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above' the agricultural labourers, as he pointedly tells us. His fictions are coloured with a rich rural conservatism where social attitudes are concerned. Hardy's Wessex countryside is to be valued as metaphor, not reportage: for the latter we have to turn to that huge bulk of contemporary material highlighting the situation of the agricultural poor, nowhere more severely felt than in Dorset. It is no wonder that his early readers were puzzled.

Thomas Hardy's architectural career is not considered a success. Seen usually as a mere prelude to his literary output, it is most often summed up by reference to the 'shockingly' suburban home he built himself at Max Gate. But in this new work, Professor Kester Rattenbury argues the opposite: that far from being incidental, Hardy's architectural thinking is integral to a full understanding of his life's work. This is the first time Hardy's life and legacy have been studied by a fellow architectural writer and critic. Reconstructed from the wealth of little-known drawings, photographs, experimental illustrations and modest built work he produced or oversaw, and an architecturally-biased re-reading of his novels, this book sets out a startling new vision of Thomas Hardy's work, and how it has shaped England in fact and fiction. The Wessex Project exposes the architectural thinking and invention underlying Hardy's novels. It shows how his famous imaginary realm Wessex can be seen as a forerunner of the experimental architectural projects of our own times - in which architects weave together design, description, polemic, and images of both real and imagined spaces, to form highly developed and challenging unbuilt projects, published in books designed to change the way we see the world. The book makes a compelling case for listing Hardy among the greatest of all conceptual architects, as well as recognising him as one of the most influential and active conservationists and architectural critics of all time. This radical new perspective gives Hardy's many readers a chance, at last, to see Wessex as the author himself constructed it: through architectural eyes.