Thomas Hardy

(1840 - 1928)

The eldest of four children growing up in Dorset in the 1840s, Thomas Hardy apprenticed to a local architect in 1856 and worked as a draftsman in London in 1862. While visiting a church in Cornwall in 1870, he met and fell in love with his future wife, immortalized in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes as well as in the poem “Beeny Cliff”: “O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, / And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free.” Hardy published Jude the Obscure in 1895.