Special Interest Event

Almost a century after his death on the 11th Jan 1928, Thomas Hardy’s life and work continues to attract admiration and controversy. Paula Byrne’s recently published biographical study Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses has renewed interest in the author’s innovative depiction of female agency and female desire and his profound sympathy with women inspired, in part, by the strong female role models in his own life and those whom he observed in the rural and urban environment. Ironically, many of his biographers have found this sympathy lacking in his personal dealings with some of the women closest to him.  

The publication of Hardy’s last great tragic, and most controversial, novel Jude the Obscure in 1895 (much of which is set in an imagined Oxford or ‘Christminster), featuring his most psychologically complex female character Sue Bridehead, aroused such hostility that Hardy abandoned novel-writing altogether to concentrate on publishing shorter fiction and establishing himself as a poet, which he always declared to have been his primary ambition.

Thomas Hardy is one of the few great writers to enjoy an equally illustrious career as a novelist, a short story writer and a poet. Our next Special Interest Event will concentrate on Hardy’s life and literary career from the publication of The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) onward, and focus on his last great tragic novels, his shorter fiction, his poetry and some of the women who inspired his work.