A PAIR OF BLUE EYES
THOMAS HARDY was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on 2 June 1840; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publication of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (1871), he determined to make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an architect had led to his meeting at St Juliot in Cornwall, Emma Gifford, who became his first wife in 1874.
In the 1860s Hardy had written a substantial amount of unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his creative effort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure, the last written of his novels, came out in 1895, closing a sequence of fiction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).
Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in his collected verse (almost all published after 1898) possess great individuality and power.
In 1910 Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in 1912 Emma died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas Hardy died in January 1928; the work he left behind—the novels, the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynasts—forms one of the supreme achievements in English imaginative literature.
ALAN MANFORD was formerly Head of English at a Birmingham comprehensive school. For his Ph.D. he prepared a critical edition of A Pair of Blue Eyes and he has published articles and reviews concerning Thomas Hardy, as well as his own writing.
TIM DOLIN is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. He is the author of Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (1997), and George Eliot (2005), and co-editor (with Peter Widdowson) of Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies (2004). He has introduced Charlotte Brontë’s Villette for Oxford World’s Classics.