Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and his poetry by Romanticism. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural communities in Britain such as those in his native South West England, a region he fictionalised as Wessex, encompassing the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and Hampshire. This novel, which Hardy had begun work on in 1874 but put aside, was first serialised in Macmillan's Magazine in the UK and Harper's Bazaar in the US before being published in three volumes in 1887.