Distinguished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy 18401928 had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years concentrating first on p... » 

Distinguished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy 18401928 had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years concentrating first on prose and then after publishing his last novel in 1895 on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative Hardy is preeminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty. «