Thomas Hardy was always fascinated by women. While in life his relationships were often fraught and unhappy, through the heroines of his novels we can see into his sole. This book assesses the influence of Hardy's closest female friends and family on his life and his work and looks at how his response to them moulded his creative genius.

This is a short story written by Thomas Hardy was published in Wessex. This tells of a woman, a wife and a mother who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. As a Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

Thomas Hardy is known for his unconventional portrayal of female characters. In Victorian literature, his women are surprisingly complex, sexual, and even "heroic." Jekel's study discusses the development of Hardy's heroines, contrasts them with typical Victorian feminine standards, and compares them to the women who Hardy knew in his personal life.

Acknowledgements -- Index