At a particularly low moment in Thomas Hardy’s bitter, furious novel “Jude the Obscure” (1895), the narrator reflects on young Jude’s friendless isolation. “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him … But nobody did come, because nobody does.” This uncompromising pessimism, as many have pointed out, is an ungenerous view of life, or at least of Hardy’s life. While his origins were as obscure as Jude’s — his father was a builder in rural Dorset, his mother a cook in domestic service — his rise was steady, and he did not lack for friends or mentors.

Hardy’s family was no more dysfunctional than most, and his parents quickly recognized their eldest son’s unusual abilities and did everything within their limited means to enlarge his horizons. The well-connected local vicar and his intellectual family took the boy on as a protégé; early employers (he started as an assistant in an architect’s office) were kind. Literary success came relatively quickly, and by the age of 50 he was not only one of England’s great men of letters but very rich as well. As his friend Edmund Gosse put it, “What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?”

This is a question that fascinates two new Hardy biographers, Claire Tomalin and Ralph Pite. Ms. Tomalin has made a solid reputation as the author of a series of literate, respectable, ever-so-slightly bland biographies of canonical writers, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Pepys, and Jane Austen. She is a favorite of the London literary establishment, so her “Thomas Hardy” (Penguin Press, 486 pages, $35) is naturally getting greater play in the press than that of Mr. Pite, a professor at the University of Cardiff in Wales. But Mr. Pite’s “Thomas Hardy: A Guarded Life” (Yale, 522 pages, $35) is the more interesting of the two books. It is less cautious than Ms. Tomalin’s, and contains more speculation and much more to argue with — it is also richer and meatier, and far less willing to accept Hardy’s disingenuous version of his life.

Hardy has always presented a special problem for biographers. An obsessively private man — Gosse called him “sphinx-like,” and the poet Henry Newbolt described him as “exquisitely remote” — he spent his life covering his tracks. He destroyed almost all of his early letters and papers, and his first wife, Emma, also disposed of hers. When he decided to write the story of his own life, he did so only to forestall indiscreet wouldbe biographers, and created what Mr. Pite calls an “extremely partial account” in two volumes (published under the supposed authorship of his second wife, Florence), after which he burned the original notebooks he had drawn from. On his request, Florence destroyed almost all the rest of his private papers after his death. The biographer, then, has a choice between caution — Ms. Tomalin’s response — and Mr. Pite’s educated, if sometimes wild, guesswork.

Ms. Tomalin stresses Hardy the Poet rather at the expense of Hardy the Novelist. She takes at face value Hardy’s statement, made late in life, that “It’s natural to me to write poetry — I was never intended to be a prose-writer, still less a teller of tales — still, one had got to live.” He came into his own as a great poet, she contends, in old age, when Emma’s death released a torrent of poems from her grieving, guilty husband. And it is true that they were unlike anything that had appeared in English literature up to that point. As Lytton Strachey wrote at the time, the poems were “modern as no other poems are. … He is incorrect; but then how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness! He fumbles; but it is that very fumbling that brings it so near to ourselves.”

While agreeing about the importance of Hardy’s poetry, Mr. Pite is unwilling to accept Hardy’s assertion that he wrote prose only to make a living. Tracing Hardy’s early literary efforts and reading habits, Mr. Pite proves that while he was always a poet (indeed he seems to have been one of the few major writers to have been equally gifted in prose and poetry) he was passionately concerned with his novels from the very beginning, and proud of his role in demolishing what he called the prudish “doll of English literature.”

Hardy’s career as a novelist, glorious in retrospect, was beset with tribulations, mostly in the form of the Victorian critics who were repelled by his characters’ evident sexuality and low social status. In 1874, the prim Henry James read “Far From the Madding Crowd” with distaste: “imitative talent … second rate … Everything human in the book strikes us as factious and insubstantial; the only thing we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.” The magnificent “Mayor of Casterbridge” (1886) was criticized for a boring lack of gentry among the characters; “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” was rejected by publishers as being too racy, and languished for two years before its 1891 publication, when it instantly became a best seller. Four years later, “Jude” was greeted with bitter hostility. The influential novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant asserted that “There may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not … from any Master’s hand.” It is easy to see why Hardy, by then a wealthy man, decided that he needed no longer to bother with the arduous business of novel-writing and could turn full-time to poetry; but this does not somehow make him more a poet than a novelist.

Working with the same materials yet drawing quite different conclusions from them, these biographies prove that the elusive Hardy was largely successful in his effort to take his secrets with him to the grave. In the end, as Ms. Tomalin says, we simply “have to accept that he intended his personal life to be kept private except for the very occasional confession.” Both Ms. Tomalin and Mr. Pite have chipped away doggedly at Hardy’s mask, but neither has managed to dislodge it completely.

Ms. Allen is the author of two collections of literary essays and one work of history, “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.”