Although Hardy wrote prolifically in several genres, his novels have achieved the most lasting recognition. Two early novels,
Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872),
were published anonymously. He used his own name on the next two, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The latter, less pessimistic in tone than his later work, was the first of his so-called Wessex novels, in which he used a fictitious English county based on his native Dorsetshire.
The Return of the Native (1878), a story of the strange and
beautiful Eustacia Vye, continues in the sequence of novels which portray the fading rural society of Wessex. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Hardy's hapless protagonist Michael
Henchard pays for the mistakes of his youth in bitter disappointment. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) tells the story of a girl whose unfortunate circumstances lead her to a tragic end. The final major Wessex novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), another story of an individual caught in the web of a rigid, conservative social system. Minor works published during this period include the novel The Woodlanders (1887) and the short story collections Wessex Tales (1888) and Life's Little Ironies (1894). At the age of fifty-five Hardy returned
to writing poetry, a vocation he had abandoned for a number of years. Although his literary reputation has been primarily established through his novels, Hardy took this work seriously. Among his considerable poetic works during this period were
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Poems of the Past and Present (1901), and a multi-volume verse drama, The Dynasts
(1904-1908), which deals with England's role during the Napoleonic wars. Short poems were published as Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925), and Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928). Several collections of his
fiction, poetry, letters, and notebooks were published posthumously.
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