Pamela Gossin's exhaustively researched book is to be welcomed as the first thoroughgoing analysis of Hardy's imaginative fictional deployment of astronomical theory. She demonstrates with verve and insight the role of contemporary nineteenth-century astronomical and cosmological knowledge in the creation of Hardy's sense of the universe and offers significant new readings of a range of novels, with an inevitable but welcome focus upon Two on a Tower . Gossin furnishes the reader with a very full sense of context in tracing the literary history of astronomy, feeling it necessary to reach back even beyond the Renaissance in order to establish the parameters of her study.

One of the problems with the book is that Gossin cannot ‘cut to the chase' but feels the need to buttress her specific study with large amounts of supporting evidence with little bearing on Hardy's own literary practice. Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe is similarly compromised in its effectiveness by Gossin's lengthy personally inflected introduction, in which the reader learns a good deal about the plains of Nebraska – relevant no doubt to the study of Willa Cather, but of doubtful pertinence to Hardy's Wessex. Overall the book is verbose and ill-focussed, and would have benefited greatly from the exercise of the editorial blue pencil. When in Part II Gossin gets down to business, ‘Reading Hardy's Novel Universe', what she has to say is most rewarding and fully articulated, utilising the extensive astronomical remarks in the notebooks to examine Hardy's response to Victorian popular astronomy. It is enlightening and valuable to be reminded of the astronomical valences of such works as A Pair of Blue Eyes , Far from the Madding Crowd , and Return of the Native , and here Gossin makes a very satisfactory and authoritative guide, notwithstanding a generally conservative critical stance signalled by her over-reliance on the work of Michael Millgate.

The examination of Two on a Tower justifies the reach and ambition of the book and provides a central and telling focus for this diffuse but inventive study.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

More details are available at the Ashgate Press website.