This study examines Hardy's prolonged struggle with his contemporary readers, whose bourgeois values he despised. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to strategies of subversion, smuggling material past his editors and finally to outspoken attack. Professor T. R. Wright attempts to balance historical research into the response of 'actual' readers and the material conditions of publishing with literary-critical analysis of the 'implied' reader inscribed in the novels themselves.
'...Wright's book registers with particular force how the novelist's uneasy relationship with his contemporary audience... left permanent traces in his text... [Wright] makes an absorbing case for a novelist both alert to and critically engaged with the conventions of his form, one whose habitual medium was less a faithful mirror than a refracting glass.' - Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement