Auden, Robert Frost, and Philip Larkin he also was visited by William Butler Yeats and Virginia Woolf, among others. In his later years, Hardy became very influential on other modern poets including W.H. Emma, who eventually became estranged from her husband, died in 1912, and in 1914 Hardy married his friend Florence Dugdale. After 1897, Hardy would publish no more novels, but began to work on a long epic poem called The Dynasts. He became increasingly respected but also invited scandal as a result of his views on sexual conduct and his fatalism. For the next several decades, Hardy continued to publish novels (most importantly The Return of the Native in 1878, Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 1891, and Jude the Obscure in 1895) as well as poetry. He also married Emma Lavinia Gifford that year, though they never had children. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) marked the beginning of his success (he was able to give up his architecture career), as well as the emergence of the fictional world of Wessex that he would go on to develop in other novels.

In 1867 Hardy returned to Dorset as an architect, and began to write.

In the 1850s Hardy developed a friendship with Horace Moule, who encouraged him to read and educate himself and who became a significant intellectual mentor to him. After attending school in Dorset, he began to be trained as an architect in London, although he always identified himself with Dorset, a rural, poor area of the country. Thomas Hardy was born in a small village to a father who was a stonemason and fiddler.

Far from the madding crowd sparknotes