Explores Hardy's account in fiction of the individual man or woman's relationship with various aspects of the encompassing world - with other individual men and women, with the aggregation known as society, with the natural and artificial environment and with the supernatural.

"Under the Greenwood Tree" or the Mellstock Quire?; Hardy's dances; "The Return of the Native" - character and the natural environment; "The Trumpet-Major", "A Laodicean" and "Two on a Tower" - the man-made environment; "The Mayor of Casterbridge" - the fate of Michael Henchard's character; "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"; Angel Clare's story; sex, marriage and the decline of traditional community in "Jude the Obscure", together with a digression on the evils (or otherwise) of drink; "From the White Sea to Cape Horn" - Thomas Hardy and the wider world.