When he moved back they asked him to plan a restoration for a church at St. Joliet in 1870. In the church of St. Joliet he met a girl with the name of Emma Gifford who he later married in 1874. Emma supported Thomas and told him to keep writing. Since he did not gain much attention from the public for his poetry a novelist named George Merideth told him to write a novel. His very first novel was The Poor Man and the Lady written in 1867; because it was rejected so many times Thomas decided to burn the manuscript. In the year 1871 Thomas’s first novel Desperate Memories was published. At first critics didn’t pay much attention to the novel and its selling was very bad. After what had happened with his first novel he decided to write another called Under the Greenwood Tree which made him a little bit more popular but still wasn’t very known. Since most of his books are fiction the novel Under the Greenwood Tree some features as the place where Thomas Hardy had grown up, including the village school in Dorchester where Thomas had attended. On the year 1872 he made another novel and was called A Pair of Blue Eyes and the novel also didn’t get him any further, but was published in the Tinsley Magazine. His real big success was the entertaining novel Far from the Madding Crowd that was published in 1874 by the Comhill Magazine. It also was the first novel to apply the name Wessex to the landscape of England. Finally this novel