Hardy's early poems and short stories were followed by a novel, Desperate Remedies (1871) and then, the following year, by his first success in Under the Greenwood Tree. A Pair of Blue Eyes was published in 1873 and his first major work, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), a Wessex story, appeared in Tinsley's Magazine and the Cornhill respectively.

These were followed by The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet-Major (1880), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) The Woodlanders (1887), his masterpiece, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy had a strong descriptive and dramatic power and he linked the scenes and events into an ironic whole. His novels are tragedies where man is seen as the futile victim of circumstances.

The Dynasts (1904-8) was a dramatic epic about the period of the Napoleonic wars.

Wessex Poems (1898), Time's Laughing-Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), and Winter Words (1928) are hardy's best known poetical works. They express his love of nature in sombre tones and his ironic visualization of man's place in it.

Hardy was born in 1840 at Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, the son of a stonemason and master builder. The family's house in the village is now preserved as Hardy's birthplace.

In his later years Hardy recalled incidents from his early life which epitomised the poverty of the labourers in the rural Dorset of his youth (the Tolpuddle martyrs were still alive at the time of his birth); one boy his own age who lay in a ditch, dead from starvation, and another labourer his own age who was hanged - his friends tying weights to his legs so that he might die quickly as he was so thin.