ABSTRACT
the first novel written by Hardy after he had moved into Max Gate was The Woodlanders. The years of its creation, 1886 and 1887, constitute an important period in his career for a variety of reasons. For one thing, he then turned a financial corner. Although Smith, Elder & Co. had sold only a little more than six hundred copies of The Mayor, the critical acclaim given this book enabled Macmillan & Co. to dispose of nearly five thousand copies of The Woodlanders a year hence. In 1887 Sampson Low issued a new one-volume edition of The Mayor and, uniform with it, they published reissues of six other novels by Hardy. This seven-volume 'set' (if the uniform bindings permit us to call it that) constitutes the first collected edition of Hardy's works. The set was not complete, for some of the Wessex novels were missing and it was not designated as a Collected Edition in the books themselves; but the uniform bindings indicated to the public that here was an important author whose 'works' were worth buying, instead of merely getting them from a Rental Library.
