Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. During the eighty-eight years of his life he published fourteen novels, four volumes of short stories, eight volumes of verse and an ‘epic-drama’, The Dynasts.

During his lifetime the most fervent criticism of Hardy concerned itself with his morality: up to and including T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods critics were largely concerned with Hardy's ‘pessimism’ and his view of God, the universe and marriage. After 1928 there was a swing towards a biographical approach to Hardy occasioned by the almost immediate posthumous publication of The Life of Thomas Hardy, ostensibly written by his widow but largely written or dictated by the writer himself.

In more recent years these moral and biographical emphases have given some ground to what we have come to regard as ‘normal’ criticism; that is to say, to an effort to see Hardy as a novelist and poet and not as a philosopher or a Dorsetshire Victorian. Recent critics have not ignored ‘Hardy the man’ or ‘Hardy's view of life’, of course, but a balance has usually been struck along the lines of J. I. M. Stewart's Thomas Hardy (1971) in which the first three chapters are ‘Hardy's Autobiography’, ‘Private Life’ and ‘Intellectual Background’; the ensuing chapters deal with the novels and poems in an objective analytical manner.