Why We Act Too Late: Thomas Hardy and the Power of Writing

Evan Swensen
February 17, 2025

“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.” —Thomas Hardy

Writing is not just an act of creativity. It is an act of urgency. Thomas Hardy understood this better than most. His works did not merely tell stories; they sounded alarms. He warned of festering social injustices in novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Yet, society resisted his calls for change until suffering was unavoidable. Hardy saw this tendency in human nature—to ignore problems until they became crises—and he used literature as his weapon against it.

But Hardy’s wisdom did not come easily. It was forged through hardship, rejection, and the weight of witnessing injustice in his own life.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the quiet village of Higher Bockhampton, England. His father was a stonemason, and his mother was a woman with a keen intellect who ensured her son had an education beyond what was expected for a child of his class. Though he trained as an architect, literature called to him in ways blueprints never could.

Yet Hardy’s path to writing was anything but smooth. England’s rigid class structure made sure of that. As a young man, Hardy was often caught between two worlds: his working-class life and the intellectual world he longed to enter. He observed the suffering of rural workers, the limitations placed on women, and the hypocrisy of Victorian morality.

This tension simmered beneath his writing. When he published Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874, critics praised its depiction of rural life, but Hardy had more to say. As his novels became more socially charged, the backlash grew.

The Victorian establishment saw Hardy’s work as dangerous. His books questioned the institutions people held sacred—marriage, religion, social class. When Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) exposed the cruelty inflicted on women by a society that blamed them for their victimization, many dismissed it as immoral. When Jude the Obscure (1895) dared to criticize the rigid constraints of marriage and education, it was labeled scandalous. One bishop reportedly burned a copy in disgust.

Hardy had only told the truth. But telling the truth often comes at a cost.

If Hardy’s novels spoke of social injustice, his personal life spoke of loneliness. His marriage to Emma Gifford began with promise—she had encouraged him to pursue writing—but it grew cold over the years. Emma resented how Hardy depicted marriage in his books, believing he had lost faith in love. He, in turn, felt misunderstood by the woman who once championed him.

Yet when Emma died in 1912, Hardy was shattered. He wrote Poems of 1912–13, a collection drenched in grief and regret. His words carried the weight of realization—of things left unsaid, of love lost not through malice but neglect. The man who had written about the cruelty of fate found himself ensnared in it.

Hardy married again, but a deepened melancholy marked his later years. He had spent a lifetime warning people to act before it was too late, yet even he was not immune to the human tendency he described: recognizing an evil only when it was beyond avoidance.

Hardy’s books did more than entertain; they forced England to confront the contradictions of its time. His depiction of Tess Durbeyfield’s tragic downfall pushed discussions about women’s rights and social hypocrisy into the mainstream. Jude the Obscure ignited debate about the cruelty of restricting education to the privileged. Even the landscapes of his novels, rich with the beauty of Wessex, reminded readers of a vanishing rural life as industrialization swept across England.

But Hardy’s influence stretched beyond literature. His work shaped public discourse, challenging Victorian ideals and paving the way for modernist writers who would take his critiques even further. Writers like D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf saw Hardy as a bridge between past and future—his words planting the seeds of social change.

Today, his insights remain strikingly relevant. Injustice still festers while society hesitates. Writers continue to face backlash when they expose uncomfortable truths. And Hardy’s warning—that humans wait until crisis is unavoidable before acting—rings louder than ever.

Hardy did not write to please. He wrote to provoke. His stories demanded that readers examine their world, question authority, and confront truths they might prefer to ignore. This is why his work still matters, why his books still resonate long after the Victorian era has faded into history.

I believe that stories do more than fill pages—they have the power to shape minds, stir hearts, and ignite change. As authors, you hold the pen turning awareness into action and hesitation into courage. Write to confront the evils threatening to divide, diminish, or destroy. Write to plant seeds of kindness, courage, and hope. Let your words be the spark igniting change, the voice refusing to be silent, and the light cutting through darkness.

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