A01=Trish Ferguson
Author_Trish Ferguson
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
legal literature
Thomas Hardy
Victorian literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781399567541
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Explores Thomas Hardy’s engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction
Thomas Hardy’s fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy’s role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.
The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre’s engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.
Trish Ferguson is currently lecturing at Liverpool Hope University, having completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin. Her primary research interests are in Victorian literature and culture, in particular the interdisciplinary nexus of law and literature in that era. She has also edited a collection of essays entitled Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, which is a study of literary responses to how industrialization affected perceptions of time in the Victorian era.
