Two on a Tower : A Romance (1882) is a novel by English author Thomas Hardy , classified by him as a romance and fantasy. It is regarded as one of his minor works. It is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, set in late Victorian Dorset. Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.