Then in 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother.

A further move to Wimborne saw Hardy write Two on a Tower, published in 1882, a romance story set in the world of astronomy.

In 1880, Hardy published his only historical novel, The Trumpet-Major. Subsequently, Hardy moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). Over the next 25 years, Hardy produced 10 more novels.

Far from the Madding Crowd was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Wessex had been the name of an early Saxon kingdom, in approximately the same part of England. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy first introduced the idea of calling the region in the west of England, where his novels are set, Wessex. Elements of Hardy's fiction reflect the influence of the commercially successful sensation fiction of the 1860s, particularly the legal complications in novels such as Desperate Remedies (1871), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Two on a Tower (1882). A plot device popularised by Charles Dickens, the term 'cliffhanger' is considered to have originated with the serialised version of A Pair of Blue Eyes (published in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of Emma, was published under his own name. In his recollections in Life and Work, Hardy described the book as 'socialistic, not to say revolutionary yet not argumentatively so.'Īfter he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that he hoped would have more commercial appeal, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), both of which were published anonymously it was while working on the latter that he met Emma Gifford, who would become his wife. He subsequently destroyed the manuscript, but used some of the ideas in his later work. So Hardy followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. Home Short Stories of Thomas Hardy Wikipedia: Novels

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