'Tess of the d'Ubervilles'

In my senior level fiction writing class, my professor preached to us over and over about finding our own voice.

It's easy to say, but near impossible to actually define. Do you know when you've found your voice or does someone else tell you?

Thomas Hardy's formal education ended at age 16 due to his socio-economic standing. So he didn't have the opportunity to have a sandal-wearing college professor to tell him to find his own voice in his writing. He just wrote. Hardy probably never even thought about "voice" or "theme" but no writer of the last 200 years had such a singular and signature voice than Hardy.

If you read 10 books without knowing the author and three were Hardy, you could pick out the Hardy books easily.

It is interesting that Hardy lived until he was 87 and didn't write another novel for the final 25+ years of his life. It's also interesting that he died in 1928. His presence in this world isn't that far detached.