Beschreibung:
"Thomas Hardy's career as an author bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and during that time he could count among his accomplishments fourteen novels, more than nine hundred poems, a little over four dozen pieces of short fiction, and a verse drama in three volumes that took as its topic the Peninsular War and the fall of Napoleon. Yet on the brink of his first great success, the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, he wrote to its editor Leslie Stephen that, although he might 'have higher aims some day', at that moment he wished 'merely to be considered a good hand at a serial'. It is safe to say that those higher aims were achieved, for after Hardy's Westminster Abbey funeral, and after large crowds had silently filed past his open grave in Poet's Corner, The Times in its obituary for him mourned the loss of English literature's 'most eminent figure'. Hardy's stature as a writer was, and remains, unassailable, and the continuing popularity of his fiction, in both print and other media, attests to his powerful and enduring representation of human experience"--