This research paper explores how Thomas Hardy critically dealt with the issues of classes, gender and social injustice in Victorian England, positioning him as a realist novelist and proto-feminist thinker. The paper undertakes a close examination of his major works such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, the Mayor of Casterbridge, far from the Madding Crowd, the Return of the Native among others to examine how Hardy expressed the life in the countryside, social mobility and deterministic forces of fate. Bathsheba Everdene, Sue Bridehead and Tess Durbeyfield are female characters in Hardy and thus encompass a broad range of femininity: independence and intellectual defiance on one end, victimhood and subjection on the other. His stories are always a critique of the patriarchal society, marriage laws that are restrictive and class differences that deny the individuals of all classes a sense of freedom particularly women. Not only is the work of Hardy a reflection of the cultural tensions of the nineteenth-century England, the industrialization, urban migration and rural decay, but it also foreshadows the feminist interests of the autonomy of women, social justice and the rebellion against oppression. Through questioning the interplay between class and gender, this paper will point to the perennial relevance of Hardy as a novelist who not only questioned the moralistic strictures and inequalities of Victorian society but also provided a profoundly sympathetic vision of the disenfranchised.