This study examines the fraught relationship Hardy had with his readers. He resented their bourgeois values and beliefs, in particular their hypocritical form of Christianity, with its repression of the body. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to 'back-door' strategies of subversion, smuggling obscene and blasphemous material past his editors, and finally to outspoken attack.

Professor Wright's analysis of this relationship attempts to balance historical research into the response of 'actual' readers (based upon manuscript letters to Hardy and his own scrapbooks of reviews) with literary-critical analysis of the 'implied' reader inscribed in the novels themselves. He also pays close attention to the material conditions of publishing in the Victorian period.

What emerges from this study is a new insight into the dynamics of Hardy's writing and into the wider literary field within which he operated.

'...Wright's book registers with particular force how the novelist's uneasy relationship with his contemporary audience... left permanent traces in his text... [Wright] makes an absorbing case for a novelist both alert to and critically engaged with the conventions of his form, one whose habitual medium was less a faithful mirror than a refracting glass.' - Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Hardy's Contemporary Readers: Some Introductory Questions
'Breaking into Fiction': The Tinsley Novels
The Cornhill Stories: 'Healthy Reading for the British Public'?
Middling Hardy: Reconsidering His Readers
Graphic Tragedies: Writing for Two Audiences
Phase the Last: Farewell to Fiction
References
Index

T.R. WRIGHT studied at Oxford and Princeton before becoming Professor of English Literature at the University of Newcastle. His books include The Religion of Humanity, Theology and Literature, Hardy and the Erotic, George Eliot's Middlemarch and D.H. Lawrence and the Bible.