Thomas Hardy

Hardy trained and worked as an architect, restoring country churches across Dorset, before novel-writing paid well enough to let him quit. He built the fictional county of Wessex out of that landscape and populated it with characters crushed by chance and convention: Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), subtitled 'A Pure Woman' in deliberate provocation, scandalized reviewers for defending its 'fallen' heroine.

Jude the Obscure (1895) provoked worse: one bishop reportedly burned his copy, and the outcry drove Hardy to abandon fiction entirely after it. He spent his last three decades writing poetry instead, including a sequence of devastating elegies after his estranged first wife Emma died in 1912. He died in 1928 in a compromise burial: his heart interred in Dorset, his ashes in Westminster Abbey.