Though considered a minor novel, A Laodicean is crucial in Thomas Hardy's career, literary art, and exploration of nineteenth-century religious issues. This is the first authoritative variorum edition of the novel, featuring a full account of its history, references, sources, and literary-religious importance. It explores Hardy's interpretation of English religious culture and his engagement with the debate between Anglicanism, Catholicism, and secularism, woven not only through its treatment of Anglican-Catholic histories of place, but also through the love lives of the main characters, connected as these are with their gradual accommodation of innate secularism alongside their growing religious interest. Alongside extensive explanatory notes, an introductory essay provides new and enlightening insights into the novel's fascinating contexts and into the process of its composition, its reception, its various editions, and the novel's rich dialects and geographies.
