Footnote 30, Chapter 8, of the author's Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, which Princeton University Press published in 1988. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
See Laurence J. Starzyk, "The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live in Hardy's 'Modern' Novels," Nineteenth Century Fiction 26 (March 1972): 419-35. A nearly opposing view, closer to mine, is taken by Richard Benvenuto in "Modes of Perception: The Will to Live injude the Obscure," Studies in the Novel 2 (Spring 1970): 31-41.
Last modified 10 July 2001