Mark Ford’s chapter on the prose style of Thomas Hardy’s fiction discerns something involuntary and dishevelled about Hardy’s style. Early reviewers lamented its bad taste and haphazard manner. But this chapter shows that therein lies a source of the novels’ power. Moments of scenic description and unexpected encounters are reviewed to reveal that the achieved faltering of Hardy’s style suggests the prose recognizing its own struggling efforts to come to terms with overmastering nature and fate.