From their first publication, the works of Thomas Hardy have been explicitly and obsessively associated with matters of gender. This is the case, not only because these texts confront and perpetuate ideas about sexual difference that were influential in Hardy's own time, but also because his vivid, contradictory, and often strange representations of sexual desire, like a series of cultural Rorschach tests, have continually elicited from his readers intense and revealing responses: the act of interpretation exposes unspoken assumptions that circulate in the historical moment of the interpreter, and Hardy's representations of sexuality are especially effective in making visible those particularized hermeneutical processes. Indeed, to study the changing responses to gender in Hardy's published works from 1871 to the present is, in effect, to trace a fairly detailed history of the ways in which sexuality has been constructed within the British Isles and North America since the late-Victorian period. This essay will offer, therefore, only a schematic summary of what, in my own historical moment, I consider to be the most significant responses to representations of sexual difference in Hardy's texts.