With the publication of Jude and The Well-Beloved, then, Hardy gave up writing prose fiction. The reasons for this may be summed up as follows. First, partly financial: when he could afford to stop producing novels, he did so; secondly, partly personal: the scandalized response of the late-Victorian moralizing lobby to Tess and Jude had seriously depressed him; thirdly, partly aesthetic: as the preceding chapter has sought to show, Hardy's fictional writing was increasingly pressing against the limits of nineteenth-century realist conventions, challenging and subverting them, and he seems to have reached a formal impasse in giving expression to his world-view. The Life, of course, as we saw earlier, invariably denigrates his novelwriting career and presents him as always primarily a poet, so to suggest that he was first a novelist and then a poet is to misrepresent him – at least in his own estimation; and on his shift of genre in the 1890s, it comments that, ‘if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect’, he must abandon fiction and ‘resume openly that form of [literary art] which had always been instinctive with him … the change, after all, [being] not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper … ’ (Life, 291, emphasis added). That final loaded phrase is further amplified by a memorandum of March 1886 reflecting on the future of prose fiction: