This book explores the Pagan-Christian conflict underlying Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, establishing connections with the political and economic structure of Victorian England and focusing primarily on the social construction of gender at this transitional time.

This timely book treats Hardy's recurring use of one of the major informing myths of Western culture—that of a collision between a solar god and an earth goddess. Stave uses a chronological examination of Hardy's Wessex novels to highlight the author's evolving consciousness of the connections among patriarchy, Christianity, sexism, and classism. From the gentle affirmation of Far From the Madding Crowd to the grim Jude the Obscure, Stave paints a world in which the goddess figures die out, displaced by messianic gods, and a Pagan worldview gives way to a world devoid of spiritual meaning.