Thomas Hardy was a novelist considered to have a dark turn of mind, as shown by the novels he wrote. At the same time, he was a writer who sought to achieve popularity and who nurtured those elements in his work which apparently appealed to readers. In addition to his novels, he wrote poetry and desired especially to be a dramatist, though he never achieved success on the stage.
Hardy did not suffer any terrible calamity as had many other writers, and the tenor of his early life is known to have been even and largely uneventful. Critics state that whatever it was within him that gave him this dark turn of mind, it is evident that he kept it hidden:
He always kept a polite and ironic mask before the world, and never, as some writers have done, let it drop so that the real man beneath might be seen and understood. Even his "official" biography serves the function of such a mask, for it was written by himself and typed under his direction by his second wife. . . and it is more interesting for what it conceals than for what it says (Carpenter 18).
Robert Gittings notes as well that Hardy's youth was seemingly without major incident, and yet at the same time he finds that it was a life of emotion and a deeply-felt sense of the pain of self-discovery:
The true story of Hardy's early work is therefore essential to the understanding of some of his finest work. This cannot, however, be reached by treating his creative work as pure autobiography, and guessing at the early life by hints from the poems and novels (Gittings 6).
Indeed, Hardy embodies his life in his work in subtle ways, including the imaginative setting of his novels, Wessex, a setting which mirrors his part of the country but does not do so exactly.
Carpenter points out that Hardy did reveal something in his biography that hints at his hidden nature without truly explaining it--indeed, it is not likely that one incident can explain a person's life. He re...