ABSTRACT
It was about two months after Hardy had written his last novel Jude (1895), that his publishers, Macmillan, decided to bring out a uniform edition of all fourteen Wessex novels – as they are now known – and ‘uniform’ was the operative word. The most important task now confronting Hardy was to shape a topographical jigsaw of the highways and byways that had emerged over twenty-five years in his fiction. This was the kind of challenge that most of his literary peers would never have to face. As Desmond Hawkins notes,
events through which the plot of the traditional novel unfolded usually took place indoors for the most part and in a social setting. With Hardy on the other hand, we are often confronted with a solitary figure in an unpeopled landscape … the human figure almost an extension of the landscape.1
