Biographie de Thomas Hardy
THOMAS HARDY was born in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in 1840. He was trained as an architect, and practised that profession for several years in his early manhood, but even then he had begun to write—first poems, which were not published until much later, and then novels. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, appeared in 1871, and for the next twenty-five years he wrote virtually nothing but fiction : fourteen novels and four collections of tales in all.
Hardy's novel-writing came to an end with Jude the Obscure in 1896, and from that time until his death more than thirty years later he wrote only verse and verse-drama : eight volumes of poems, the vast epic-drama The Dynasts (1902-8), and The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923). He died on 11 January 1928, in his eighty-eighth year. SAMUEL HYNES is the editor of the five-volume Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, from which the texts of this selection have been taken.
His other works include The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, The Auden Generation, and A War Imagined. He is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University. FRANK KERMODE, retired King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, is the General Editor of The Oxford Authors Series. He is the author of many books, including Romantic Image, The Sense of an Ending, The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy, Forms of Attention, and History and Value ; he is also co-editor with John Hollander of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.