Using close reading, this text studies the ways in which Thomas Hardy writes about music, and argues that this focus allows for a close and varied investigation of the affective dimensions of his poetry and fiction - and his recurrent preoccupations with time, community and love.

Finally, although the book does incorporate some biographical detail about Thomas Hardy's lifelong passion for playing and collecting music, it predominantly works through close reading, while also drawing at points on literary theoretical texts, where these offer ways of articulating the broad questions of literary convention and representation that arise.

"Souls unreconciled to life"
"those unaccountable sensations"
"the beats of being"
"till time seemed fiction"
"let every man make a philosophy for himself out of his own experience".