Ginsburg argues that An Imaginative Woman, rather than being a condemnation of feminine propensity toward imaginativeness, is a story about the relation between gender, the imagination, and literary creation, and, more precisely, a story that confronts two gendered ways of understanding the poetic imagination. An Imaginative Woman, a short story Thomas Hardy wrote in 1893 while working on Jude the Obscure, tells of a woman--a wife and a mother--who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. The story displays many of the features people have come to associate with Hardy's most celebrated novels: a plot marked by the failure of events to occur at the right time; the presence of an impersonal, indifferent will manifested through the repetition of traces; a critique of the institution of marriage and of the lot of women within it; an uncanny element that challenges natural laws without completely suspending them.