In 1966, Ian Gregor contributed to Essays in Criticism an essay entitled ‘What Kind of Fiction did Hardy Write?’ The simple yet arresting quality of the question posed in that title was significant on at least two grounds. First, Thomas Hardy had been for some years the subject of a good deal of critical writing, but much of it had dragged an aimless trail through the marshy terrain of Schopenhauer and the Immanent Will, fixated on peasants and pessimism. Hardy had been patronised, Freudianised, mythologised; his fiction was the lumbering vehicle of a home-spun cosmic gloom appropriate in its simplistic earnesty to a half-educated son of the soil. There had, of course, been some excellent Hardy criticism; but Professor Gregor’s enquiry about the form of his fiction opened a new, now frequently-acknowledged perspective. The question was significant, however, not only because it had been insufficiently raised before but because it seemed precisely the right question to pose about that particular author. We don’t commonly ask ourselves what kind of fiction Scott, Jane Austen or George Eliot wrote—not because those novelists don’t confront us with considerably complex issues of form and genre, but because we shape our questions about their artistic techniques within a fairly established sense of what sort of formal enterprise we are dealing with. But with Hardy the position is different. Pastoral, melodrama, social realism, scientific naturalism, myth, fable, tragedy, ideology: it isn’t only that various of these categories fit various of his novels, but that several of them can fit the same work. Maybe all developed literary forms are complex amalgams of other forms; but with Hardy the issue is at once unusually visible and troublingly elusive.