Hardy's Sister

As I explained in The Birth Order Book of Love: How the Number One Personality Predictor Can Help You Find 'The One,' birth order is regarded by most, though not all, social scientists, psychologists, and family researchers, as having a stronger influence upon personality than any other variable, including class, education, gender, and socioeconomic status. That being the case, it is quite to the point to examine the gender of a writer's siblings and the age gap separating him from them in order to facilitate the development of an accurate personality portrait for that writer. Once we have accomplished this initial task, we can then springboard the discussion from the general to the particular, from the overview of the personality to the effect that personality may have had upon the themes, style, and content of the writer's work. In no sense an attempt to limit our understanding of an artist or to diminish the richness of biographical interpretation now possible given modern analytic tools, this inquiry is more an attempt to discover how the influence of personality has worked itself out in a writer's life, shedding light, in the process, on the works of that artist. For example, let us consider Thomas Hardy's sister Mary. Born in 1841, one year after Hardy, she would have exerted a crucial influence on him since, as I have argued elsewhere, proximity of siblings is decisive in personality formation. We can expect Hardy to be romantic to a fault. And any examination of his poetry bears out this conclusion. As Michael Millgate points out, Hardy's sister, so close in age, naturally had a greater influence on him than his brother, Henry, or sister Katharine, born ten and sixteen years, respectively, after Hardy.
Reference: Millgate, Michael. 2006. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford University Press. Page 21.