element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers' interest. Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the public wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed. His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (183839), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–1848), David Copperfield (184950), Bleak House (185253), Little Dorrit (18551857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (186061). There is a gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes which mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the 19th century. William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign. With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict a more middle-class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848), subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a popular form in Victorian literature: a historical novel in which recent history is depicted. Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë produced notable works of the period, although these were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only work, is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view, which examines class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her sister Charlotte, is another major 19th-century novel that has gothic themes. Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), written in a realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly considered to be the first sustained feminist novel. Later in this period George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and in 1872 her most famous work Middlemarch. Like the Brontës she published under a masculine pseudonym. Novelist Thomas Hardy wrote in the later decades of the Victorian era. His most notable works include Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Renowned for his cynical yet idyllic portrayal of pastoral life in the English countryside, Hardy's work pushed back against widespread urbanization that came to symbolize the Victorian age. Other significant novelists of this era were Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), George Meredith (1828–1909), and George Gissing