Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches for a living before the novels supported him, and the buildings show: his books are constructed, and their catastrophes arrive with the inevitability of load-bearing walls. He set nearly all of them in Wessex, a half-invented south-west England drawn precisely enough to walk through, and used it to say what the age preferred not to hear about marriage, class and the position of women. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure were attacked so violently that he stopped writing fiction altogether at fifty-five. He then spent thirty years writing the poetry many readers now think his finest work, including the extraordinary elegies for the wife he had been estranged from for twenty years and mourned for the rest of his life.