Abstract
"To write criticism about Hardy is to encounter uncertainties, embarrassments, challenges and revisions as opposed to criticism of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad whose positions have been established." The tenor of this remark by Irving Howe resounds in the works of many Hardy critics who constantly refer to the harmful and misleading preconceptions with which Hardy's work is met; Roy Morrell even goes as far as saying that "for seventy years Hardy's ideas have been criticized so often that our whole approach to his books is conditioned by misunderstandings" and that he would consequently like "the whole lot to be ruled out of court." George Wing is occupied with the same problem, but goes further to contemplate Hardy's changing importance on the literary scene, finding it "a growing posthumous irony that this writer Hard who was so patronisingly received by the earlier reviewers, should become the centre of so much high- minded debate, so much intellectual marching and counter-marching, so often misinterpreted, so often definitely resolved."