Desperate Remedies

**Murder, Bigamy, Blackmail, and a Dangerous Marriage**

**Thomas Hardy's Sensational First Novel**

**The Gothic Detour Before Wessex Became Famous**

**The Breakthrough Born from a Brutal Review**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came Desperate Remedies: a first book in which Thomas Hardy's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

---

Desperate Remedies is the first published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. It is a sensation novel because it contains themes of bigamy, murder, illegitimacy, blackmail, and impersonation. It was released anonymously by Tinsley Brothers in 1871.

In Desperate Remedies a young woman, Cytherea Graye, is forced by poverty to accept a post as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe, the woman whom her father had loved but had been unable to marry. Cytherea loves a young architect, Edward Springrove, but Miss Aldclyffe's machinations, the discovery that Edward is already engaged to a woman whom he does not love, and the urgent need to support a sick brother drive Cytherea to accept the hand of Aeneas Manston, Miss Aldclyffe's illegitimate son, whose first wife is believed to have perished in a fire; however, their marriage is almost immediately nullified when it emerges that his first wife had left the inn before it caught fire. Manston's wife, apparently, returns to live with him, but Cytherea, her brother, the local rector, and Edward come to suspect that the woman claiming to be Mrs. Manston is an impostor.

After Hardy had trouble publishing his first novel, he was told to "attempt a novel with a purely artistic purpose, giving it a more "complicated" plot than was attempted with his first, unpublished novel." The publication of Desperate Remedies was Hardy's breakthrough, and the first of a long string of novels that propelled him to the forefront of Victorian letters.

Some critics cite "quasi-gothic" elements in Desperate Remedies. It was positively reviewed in the Athenaeum and Morning Post. However, the review in The Spectator excoriated Hardy and his work, calling the book "a desperate remedy for an emaciated purse" and that the unknown author had "prostituted his powers to the purposes of idle prying into the way of wickedness." Hardy wrote of the review: "alas...The Spectator brought down its heaviest leaded pastoral staff on the prematurely happy volumes...the bitterness of that moment was never forgotten, at that moment I wished I was dead." Desperate Remedies is a 1993 New Zealand drama film directed by Stewart Main and Peter Wells. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

---

*“ Hardy wrote of the review: ”*

---

**Why Desperate Remedies Still Matters**

Read today, Desperate Remedies offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how Desperate Remedies first opened the path ahead.*