Where to Start with Thomas Hardy: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Thomas Hardy — whether to begin with Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, or The Mayor of Casterbridge. A complete reading guide.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is the last great Victorian novelist and the first major twentieth-century English poet — a writer whose Wessex novels (Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure) constitute the most powerful account of rural England’s destruction by industrialism, religious hypocrisy, and social convention. His fiction is simultaneously a pastoral celebration of the Dorset countryside he knew from childhood and a tragedy about the people that landscape produces and then destroys.
Where to Start
The Most Accessible: Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
The best first Hardy — his most immediately engaging novel and the one with the most conventionally satisfying ending. Bathsheba Everdene, who inherits a farm and manages it herself (a radical act in 1874), attracts three very different men: Gabriel Oak, the steadfast shepherd who will eventually become her ideal husband; Sergeant Troy, the handsome, reckless soldier who dazzles her; and William Boldwood, the middle-aged farmer driven to obsession by Bathsheba’s thoughtless Valentine. Hardy’s Wessex — the farmlands, the seasonal rhythms, the community life — is at its most beautiful here, and the novel’s plot, while tragic in places, does not end in devastation.
The Great Tragedy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
Hardy’s most widely read and most emotionally powerful novel — the one that most fully embodies his sense of the universe’s indifference to human suffering. Tess’s story is simultaneously individual (the terrible specificity of her destruction by two men and one hypocritical society) and universal (the subtitle ‘A Pure Woman’ is Hardy’s argument that society’s definition of purity is an instrument of oppression). The novel’s prose in the Wessex landscape passages reaches its greatest beauty; its account of Tess’s suffering is among the most moving in Victorian fiction.
The Character Study: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Hardy’s most concentrated character study — the story of Michael Henchard, who sells his wife at a country fair while drunk and spends the rest of his life attempting and failing to escape the consequences of that act. Henchard’s rise to become mayor of Casterbridge and his subsequent destruction — by the arrival of his former wife, by the energy and competence of the young Donald Farfrae, by his own pride and self-destructiveness — is Hardy’s most sustained account of tragic character: a man whose qualities of character are the same qualities that destroy him. Relatively short (under 400 pages) and the most unified of the Wessex novels.
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Hardy’s final and most personally felt novel — the one whose critical reception caused him to give up prose fiction entirely. Jude Fawley’s frustrated intellectual ambitions (barred from the university by his class) and his relationship with the brilliant, unconventional Sue Bridehead are Hardy’s most direct engagement with the Victorian institutions that destroy the people most capable of transcending them. The novel’s ending — which Hardy thought merely truthful and Victorian critics thought unforgivably bleak — is one of the most devastating in English fiction.
The Return of the Native (1878)
Hardy’s most symbolic novel — the one most influenced by the Greek tragedies he admired. The conflict between Clym Yeobright, who has returned from Paris with ideals of improving his Egdon Heath community, and Eustacia Vye, who wants to escape the heath entirely, generates a tragedy of incompatible desires in which neither character can achieve what they want because they are fundamentally opposed. Egdon Heath itself — dark, ancient, indifferent to human activity — is Hardy’s most powerful symbolic landscape. Best approached after Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess.
Reading Thomas Hardy
Hardy’s fiction is most fully appreciated by readers who are willing to submit to his particular vision of the world: one in which landscape, season, and historical change are forces as significant as individual character; in which the most passionate and vital people are the most likely to be destroyed; and in which happiness, when it exists, is fragile and contingent. His prose is richest in the descriptive passages — the Wessex landscapes, the seasonal transitions — and most direct in the dialogue. Reading him slowly, attentive to the physical world he describes, is the correct approach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Thomas Hardy?
Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) is the best starting point — Hardy's first major success and his most immediately engaging novel. The story of Bathsheba Everdene's three suitors — the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the reckless Sergeant Troy, and the obsessive Farmer Boldwood — is Hardy's most directly plotted novel and his least relentlessly tragic. It demonstrates the Wessex pastoral world at its most beautiful and Hardy's gifts at their most accessible. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is the most widely read starting point for readers who want Hardy's full tragic power from the beginning.
What is Tess of the d'Urbervilles about?
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) follows Tess Durbeyfield, a country girl from Dorset, whose family discovers they are descended from the ancient d'Urbervilles and who is sent to claim kinship with a wealthy family of that name. Her seduction by Alec d'Urberville, her subsequent marriage to the idealistic Angel Clare, Angel's abandonment of her when he learns of her past, and her eventual fate are Hardy's most sustained argument about the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual morality and the destruction of exceptional people by social convention. Hardy's subtitle — 'A Pure Woman' — was itself a provocation to Victorian reviewers.
What is Jude the Obscure about?
Jude the Obscure (1895) follows Jude Fawley, a stonemason in Dorset with intellectual ambitions he cannot fulfil because of his class, and Sue Bridehead, the most intellectually independent woman in Hardy's fiction, who lives with Jude outside marriage in the teeth of Victorian convention. The novel is Hardy's most explicit social critique — of the class system that bars Jude from education, and of the marriage laws that trap both characters — and his most personally felt: the character of Jude draws on Hardy's own frustrated ambitions. Queen Victoria reportedly said it was 'almost too tragic' to be read; Hardy was so disturbed by the critical response that he never wrote another novel.
Is Hardy's fiction pessimistic?
Hardy's fiction is often described as pessimistic, but the more precise description is fatalistic: his novels are driven by a sense that the universe is indifferent to human suffering, that social institutions (marriage, class hierarchy, religious convention) destroy the most vital and deserving people, and that human happiness is perpetually undermined by timing, circumstance, and the gap between aspiration and reality. His pessimism is not nihilism — he cares deeply about his characters' suffering — but it is not consoled by either religious belief or social optimism. His Wessex world, beautiful and doomed, is his primary subject.
