Although Thomas Hardy was primarily a poet, he was able to translate the themes of his poems – tragic heroes, criticism of Victorian society, disappointments in love and life, the tricks of fate – very convincingly into longer, prose works. One of these is definitely “Unimportant”, a novel in which Hardy writes the story of a man who has been trying his whole life to step out of the framework into which he was born, into the life he so desperately desires. He desperately wants to become a scholar at an elite university, to become part of the elite, but this is prevented by the game of fate, which brings him across two very different women; one marriage, into which he was tricked and which ends badly, and one open relationship with his cousin, which ends in separation, after the murder of their children. The story, which is turned by the wheels of highly moral Victorian society, is a complex study of interpersonal relationships, dark and hopeless, bittersweet. The book was met with negative reviews upon its publication in 1895, as it dealt with topics that were controversial in the society of the time – organized religion, sexuality, the institution of marriage, the education system. This reception of the book by critics and readers is said to be one of the reasons why it was Hardy's last novel.