Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose writing immortalized the semi-fictional Wessex countryside and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, wrote fifteen novels, including The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). He is also renowned as one of the greatest poets of his era.
Rosemarie Morgan is a professor of English at Yale. Her many works on Thomas Hardy include Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy and Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy.
Shannon Russell is an assistant professor of English at John Cabot University in Rome.
