Considering himself primarily to be a poet, Hardy wrote novels mostly to earn money. However, this is complicated by the economic role Wessex played in Hardy's career. The idea of Wessex plays an important artistic role in Hardy's works (particularly his later novels), assisting the presentation of themes of progress, primitivism, sexuality, religion, nature and naturalism. Similarly, the nature and significance of ideas of 'Wessex' were developed over a long series of novels through a lengthy period of time. Cornwall was also referred to but named 'Off Wessex'. When he created the concept of a fictional Wessex, it consisted merely of the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up by the time he wrote Jude the Obscure, the boundaries had extended to include all of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, much of Berkshire, and some of Oxfordshire, with its most north-easterly point being Oxford (renamed 'Christminster' in the novel). The actual definition of 'Hardy's Wessex' varied widely throughout Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. In an 1895 preface to the 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as 'a merely realistic dream country'. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. Hardy named the area 'Wessex' after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan.

Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England.

Locations in Wessex, from The Wessex of Thomas Hardy by Bertram Windle, 1902, based on correspondence with Hardy

Thomas hardy novel jude