With whom better to start than Thomas Hardy, with his career that spanned more than five decades of prolific publishing, from his first 1871 novel, Desperate Remedies, to his 1925 poetry collection, Human Shows; with his generic range from the baggy Victorian serialized novel, to a historical (and experimental) epic poem, to his elliptical modernist elegies; and with his ambiguous critical future, claimed (and sometimes rejected) by both Victorianists and modernists, both theorists of the novel and critics of the lyric? 1 Because of these messy boundaries and definitions, I have chosen to begin with him because his range allows me to explicate my three main apertures into modernist empathy – spatial, formal, and psychological – within one oeuvre.