Tom Hardy

Biography

Thomas Hardy was born at Upper Bockhampton near Dorchester in Dorset. His father was a stonemason. His mother was ambitious and well-read and supplemented his formal education. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association.

In 1874, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, the subject of his later work 'A Pair of Blue Eyes'. Although Hardy became estranged from his wife, her death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. He made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with her, and with their courtship, and wrote a series, Poems 1912-13, exploring his grief. In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, 40 years his junior, whom he met in 1905. The writer Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married wife and was encouraging about the younger author's work.

Burial site of Thomas Hardy's heartHardy was a confirmed atheist. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God. Hardy fell ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral, on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, was a controversial occasion: his family and friends had wished him to be buried at Stinsford but his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, had insisted he should be placed in Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford and his ashes were interred in the abbey. Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust. Hardy's work was admired by authors D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1910 he was appointed as a Member of the Order of Merit