A passing remark in the 1996 Conclusion to the first edition of this book noted ‘those … (re)presentations of [Hardy's] texts flickering in increasing numbers across our screens’. And it is fair to say, as for so many ‘classic’ authors these days, that a Hardy novice may well first come across his work as a cinema or TV film, since there is now a proliferation of versions of his fiction in this medium. Excellent, of course, if this experience persuades the novice to go and read the novel itself afterwards – but also potentially disconcerting when it turns out that the second experience is markedly different to the first. For in the nature of things, film ‘adaptations’ are precisely that: texts which have to do things to the original text in order to become a film (of limited duration) and to attract a modern audience. What interests me, and what I shall briefly explore in this new ‘Postscript’ to a volume in which I have presented Hardy's fiction as radically subversive in both content and texture, is what kind of ‘things’ get done to his work by modern filmmakers, and what their implications may be for the representation of Hardy as ‘our contemporary’.

However, before considering more recent film versions of Hardy's fiction, it is worth noting that there were four silent films made during his own lifetime and one the year after he died: a Famous Players Film Company (USA) version of Tess of the d‘Urbervilles in 1913; a Turner Films Ltd (UK) Far from the Madding Crowd in 1915; a Progress Film Company (UK) The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1921; a Metro-Goldwin-Mayer (USA) Tess in 1924; and a British International Pictures (UK) Under the Greenwood Tree in 1929. Given how recent was the provenance of the new technological art form, it is to Hardy's credit that in his seventies and eighties he could react with considerable aplomb, as his letters reveal, to the overtures made to him to adapt his work for the cinema – perhaps merely confirming the now long-running critical notion that Hardy was, in himself, already a ‘filmic’ writer who had an instinctive and prescient sympathy with the form.