This study examines the fraught relationship Hardy had with his readers. He resented their bourgeois values and beliefs, in particular their hypocritical form of Christianity, with its repression of the body. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to 'back-door' strategies of subversion, smuggling obscene and blasphemous material past his editors, and finally to outspoken attack. Professor Wright's analysis of this relationship attempts to balance historical research into the response of 'actual' readers (based upon manuscript letters to Hardy and his own scrapbooks of reviews) with literary-critical analysis of the 'implied' reader inscribed in the novels themselves. He also pays close attention to the material conditions of publishing in the Victorian period. What emerges from this study is a new insight into the dynamics of Hardy's writing and into the wider literary field within which he operated.