Thomas Hardy stirred up Victorian readers

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840), whose most well known books, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), examined the decline of rural Victorian English society. Hardy was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Dickens and his criticism English urban life. Tess and Jude received a lot of criticism, Tess for its apparent sympathetic portrait of a woman of ill repute, and Jude for its criticism of marriage and its open discussion of sexual themes. He wrote no more novels after that.

T.F. Powys wrote Mr Weston's Good Wine

T.F. Powys

It is the birthday of British writer T.F. Powys (1875), once called the English Tolstoy, whose best known novel, Mr Weston's Good Wine (1927), is  a lyrical allegory about a traveling wine merchant and his assistant who spend one night in a rural English village as they offer the inhabitants cures for what ails them: light wine (love) or dark wine (death). Powys' prose is populated with strange and whimsical characters, and  symbolism galore.

Powys came from a talented family of 11 children. His brothers, John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys, were novelists. One sister, Philippa Powys, was a novelist and poet. His sister Marian Powys wrote an authoritative book on lace and lace-making. His sister Gertrude Powys was a painter. His brother A.R. Powys wrote books on architecture and served as secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. His father, Charles, was an Anglican priest.

T.F. Powys tried to become a farmer. He apprenticed when he was 15 and eventually ran his own farm but apparently spent more time sitting in the shade reading than he did plowing the fields. In his mid-20s, he gave up farming, moved to Dorset, a county in southwestern England, and pursued a writing career. He married a local girl, had two children and then adopted a daughter.

Critics say Powys seems to be a religious writer, and much of his work is apparently inspired by the Bible, yet there is no discernible orthodoxy in his writing. Indeed, he seems to poke fun at clergy, often the only intellectuals in his stories. Other village characters he depicts as cheeky and mischievous or unsophisticated dolts or useless sentimentalists.

Powys was enamored with the work of such diverse writers as Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche. Perhaps the influence is seen in works in which he populates a seemingly idyllic English countryside with decidedly odd characters. In Unclay (1931), one John Death arrives in a village in search of two inhabitants he is charged with removing from human life. Trouble is, Mr. Death has misplaced the parchment upon which was written the names of his targets. Instead Mr. Death, who is depicted as sexually attractive, sleeps with many of the residents, including those he is there to "unclay."

Powys other books include Black Bryony (1923), Mark Only (1924), Mr Tasker's Gods (1925), and Mockery Gap (1925) and numerous short story collections. His previously unpublished book, The Market Bell, was published in 1991.

Walter de la Mare: poet, novelist

Walter de la Mare

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Walter de la Mare (1873), whose poems and ghost stories intrigued British children for generations. After schooling, he went to work in the 1890s for Standard Oil Company in London as a bookkeeper. He was married, had a family but still found time to write. He worked for Standard Oil for 18 years. His first novel, Henry Brocken (1904), a tale of the supernatural, was published. Four years later, through the intervention of a friend with connections, he was granted a Civil List pension, allowing him to leave his job and focus on his writing. It afforded him the opportunity to  produce children's poetry, chilling ghost stories and one of his most memorable works, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), which some critics have called a tour de force. It is a fully realized fictional memoir of a diminutive woman whose story is supposedly being published after her death. It is left in the care of a friend, a standard-sized man who visited her throughout her life, and offers an introduction by way of explaining its publication. It begins with the narrator, Miss M, noting that newspaper stories about her were works of fiction in which the reporter, apparently to amuse his readers, made jokes about her physical features, suggesting, among other things, that she was an expert painter of miniatures and a changeling who could speak the fairy tongue. The book goes on to reveal a human being, regardless of size, with a mind and heart and thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Literature, one of Britain's most prestigious awards.The poetry of de la Mare has been compared with William Blake and Thomas Hardy.