Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet who trained as an architect before turning to fiction. He set most of his novels in a partly invented Wessex, where rural lives are pressed on by chance, class and social convention, in books including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The hostile reception of Jude ended his novel-writing, and he spent his last three decades publishing poetry, which he had always regarded as his real vocation.