'She was swayed into emotional opinions concerning the strange man before her; new impulses of thought...entered into her with a gnawing thrill.' Hardy's first published work, Desperate Remedies moves the sensation novel into new territory. The anti-hero, Aeneas Manston, as physically alluring as he is evil, even fascinates the innocent Cytherea, though she is in love with another man. When he cannot seduce her, Manston resorts to deception, blackmail, bigamy, murder, and rape. Yet this compelling story also raises the great questions underlying Hardy's major novels, which relate to the injustice of the class system, the treatment of women, probability and causality. This edition shows for the first time that the sensation novel was always Hardy's natural medium. Patricia Ingham has edited texts by Hardy (including Jude the Obscure for OWC), Dickens, Gaskell and Gissing, as well as writing widely on the Victorian novel. She is the General Editor of the Authors in Context series in OWC, and author of the volume on Thomas Hardy.