This internationally acclaimed book offers a provocative challenge to Hardy's reputation as a writer primarily of rural realism. Penny Boumelha here examines his writing in the light of its central concern with women and marriage. The author traces Hardy's development from the early novels, in which the male and female natures are polarities, to the later fictions. This culminated in Jude the Obscure, in which there are marked similarities between the two protagonists and where the heroine's tragedy resides not in any given idea of female nature, but in her specific experiences as a woman. This new edition includes a previously unpublished chapter - '"Bright Faces of the New: " Bodies, Children and Futures in Hardy's Novels.' - which seeks to balance the widespread critical emphasis on Hardy's preoccupation with the way that the past - personal, historical and evolutionary - impinges on the present with an exploration of his representation of possible futures.