For the Wessex Edition Hardy classes his works into three groups, "novels of character and environment", "romances and fantacies", and "novels of ingenuity". Each volume of the Wessex Edition contains the following list with the classification of each novel:

I — Novels of Character and Environment

1 Tess of the d'Urbervilles
2 Far from the Madding Crowd
3 Jude the Obscure
4 The Return of the Native
5 The Mayor of Casterbridge
6 The Woodlanders
7 Under the Greenwood Tree
8 Life's Little Ironies and A Few Crusted Characters
9 Wessex Tales

II — Romances and Fantacies

10 A Pair of Blue Eyes
11 The Trumpet-Major ond Robert His Brother
12 The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of Temperament
13 A Group of Noble Dames
14 Two on a Tower

III — Novels of Ingenuity

15 Desperate Remedies
16 The Hand of Ethelberta
17 A Laodicean

This list continues with two more categories, "mixed novels" and "verse". The numbers assigned to each novel correspond to the number of the respective volume of this edition and reflect the value Hardy assigned to each work. The order in which his novels appear in 1912 differs from that of the Wessex Novels Edition. Here their arrangement was:

1 Tess of the d'Urbervilles
2 Far from the Madding Crowd
3 The Mayor of Casterbridge
4 A Pair of Blue Eyes
5 Two on a Tower
6 The Return of the Native
7 The Woodlanders
8 Jude the Obscure
9 The Trumpet-Major
10 The Hand of Ethelberta
11 A Laodicean
12 Desperate Remedies
13 Wessex Tales
14 Life's Little Ironies
15 A Group of Noble Dames
16 Under the Greenwood Tree

The Well-Beloved appeared in 1897 and was included in the Wessex Novels Edition. Hardy finished Jude the Obscurewhile the Wessex Novels Edition was being published. Jude was includedimmediately in this edition, the first edition in book-form forming the eighth volume of the Wessex Novels Edition. As far as these two novels are concerned it is therefore not possible to draw a conclusion as to how Hardy ranked them within the context of his works. Not surprisingly the action of five out of the first seven volumes is almost exclzusively set in South Wessex, and thus stresses the emphasis of this edition on rural environments. These works, including Two on a Tower, were also those with which Hardy's immediate success--reflected in reprints and subsequent editions--was biggest. The Trumpet-Major, The Hand of Ethelberta and A Laodicean did not sell particularly well. With Desperate Remedies Hardy had incurred loss; and owing to the sale of the copyright of Under the Greenwood Tree he had lost financial interest in this novel.

The reason for the ranking of the novels in this particular order has almost certainly been the result of the responses from the public which Hardy had received. The sales figures of Macmillan's Uniform and Pocket Editions continue to suggest the trend that readers preferred the novels that are almost exclusively set in Wessex, and Hardy's new--slightly revised ranking--of his novels accounts for this. Thus he writes new, mostly short prefaces to his works to be included in the Wessex Edition. More importantly he writes a preface to the entire edition, the "General Praface to the Novels and Poems". In it he introduces the classification of his works and gives reasons for doing so.According to Hardy the group of works "called 'Novels of Character and Environment' ... contains those [works] which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail." (1) "Romances and Fantancies" is for Hardy "a sufficiently descriptive definition" (2) that he does not feel any need to go into further detail. The works of the last group, "Novels of Ingenuity"

show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterised as 'Experiments,' and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life. (3)

Considering that Hardy experimented with his writing throughout his career this classification is more likely the outcome of a look at sales figures rather that that of Hardy's ambitions at the time of writing.

Furthermore, in the idea of classifying his works Hardy may well have been influenced by previous literary criticism. To start with his friend Edmund Gosse suggests a classification as early as 1890. Evidently excluding Desperate Remedies Gosse writes:

His [Hardy's] ten novels may be divided into four classes ... . His two masterpieces are, without question, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874, and The Return of the Native, 1878; in these he has filled large canvasses with complete success. A second class consists of novels sketched on the same broad and generous plan, but, for one reason or another, executed with less bravura, and more unequal in their evolution; these are A Laodicean, 1881; The Woodlanders, 1887; and perhaps A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873. Yet another class contains books of smaller compass, but, more obviously than the last mentioned masterpieces of their kind: The Trumpet Major [sic], 1880; Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872; and, less perfect in its proportions than either of these, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886. Finally come two books which, although full of cleverness ... are yet partial failures, The Hand of Ethelberta, 1876, and Two on a Tower, 1882. (4)

Gosse's grouping of Hardy's novels, looks nothing like Hardy's own, which is not surprising, considering that Hardy had not yet fully developed his concept of Wessex in any of its dimensions. This would, however, not be the first instance of their co-operation. Despite the lack of similarity between this and any of Hardy's groupings, Hardy speaks in 1912 of "classification" and thereby uses the same term as did Gosse in 1890. Hardy is once more almost certain to have had knowledge of this review, for twelve days after its appearance he wrote to Gosse--for the first time, according to the Collected Letters, in more than twenty months. As it happens, in this case, too, Hardy did not choose to collect this review in his Scrapbook. This would be consistent with a number of other cases in which it has become evident that the reviews he omitted in his collection had influenced him in one way or another.

Gosse may have been the first person to suggest a classification of Hardy's works, but he was not the only one. Lionel Johnson, too, tries his hand at classifying Hardy's fiction and also uses the word "classification":

For clearness' sake, a classification of these fifteen volumes (5) may be tried ... There seem to be three such groups: the Tragic, the Idyllic, and a third; for which I can find no name, until one word be discovered to express in combination the comic, the ironic, the satiric, the romantic, the extravagant; a spirit of mocking audacity, and of serious laughter ... . (6)

To Johnson the tragic group consists of Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Under the category idyllic fall Under the Greenwood Tree and The Trumpet-Major. Finally, the third group comprises of The Hand of Ethelberta, Two on a Tower, A Laodicean, A Group of Noble Dames and The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. (7) Also this classification does not resemble Hardy's own, but Hardy had knowledge of Johnson's work. Similar to the publication of the first two maps of Wessex critics had once again been one step ahead of Hardy. Although he did not follow the classifications Gosse and Johnson had suggested, the idea of classifying his works came in handy for it enabled Hardy to assemble those books that were most popular at the time into one group which he retrospectively calls novels of character and environment. Comprising only of half of the novels it is this group for which he is known to modern readers and that gives rise to the narrow interpretation of his fiction of restricting itself to rural life. Immediately, of course, his readers must have felt confirmed in their judgement, and Hardy takes other additional steps to encourage this very limited interpretation of his novels.

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