How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

His verse had a profound influence on later writers notably Philip Larkin who included many of Hardy's poems in the edition of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse that Larkin edited in 1973. In 1870 while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford whom he married in 1874. Shortly after Hardy's death the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks.

However since the 1950s Hardy has been recognized as a major poet and had a significant influence on The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s including Phillip Larkin. Initially therefore he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset Wiltshire Somerset Devon Hampshire and much of Berkshire in south west England.