Thomas Hardy was born June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England, and he died there eighty-eight years later. His major novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd, take place in an intricately imagined English county he called Wessex, which he patterned on Dorset.

The town where Hardy was born, Higher Bockhampton, was poor, but Hardy was born into a line of skilled laborers. His father was a master mason, as was his grandfather, and throughout his childhood it was assumed that Hardy would be a mason also. In 1856 he was apprenticed to an architect and went to live in Dorchester, the county seat, where he was to live for most of his life. After gaining full status as an architect, Hardy took up writing poetry, but was not successful in getting his works published, and so he turned to writing fiction. In all, he published fourteen novels...