“He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.”

Victorian English novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy is best known for his novels exploring rural life and human suffering, particularly *Tess of the d’Urbervilles* and *Jude the Obscure*. His later work shifted toward poetry, where he grappled with themes of mortality and the passage of time.