The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) spent most of his life in Dorset. He was born in a cottage at Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester and left school at the age of 16 to become apprenticed to a Dorchester architect. Hardy moved to London in 1862 to work for Arthur Blomfield, architect and church restorer, but returned to Dorset in 1867. His first success as a novelist came when he published Under the Greenwood Tree in 1872, and the following year he became a full time novelist. In 1874 Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford. Unhappily, their union became increasingly loveless over the years and intent on his writing, Hardy neglected his wife. His later novels shocked Emma, who had become fiercely religious.

Hardy published a huge number of novels and poems, including such famous works as Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The stories they tell were largely set in the south west of England in a fictional area Hardy called Wessex.

The Dorset County Museum has the largest Hardy collection in the world, the bulk of which was bequeathed to the Museum by his second wife Florence Hardy. The most fascinating material from this collection, including manuscripts, books, diaries, photographs, notebooks and paintings, is on show in A Writer's Dorset. At the centre of the Gallery is the reconstruction of Hardy's study at Max Gate, with all his books and furniture, including his desk and pens.