Where could Hardy go after Jude?

I was very pleased and amused to read A. Alvarez's afterword to Jude the Obscure in the old Signet edition I was reading - I swear I did not read his piece until I finished reading the novel - and found that not only did we agree on the main point, that the novel is primarily about sexuality and about Jude's torment on being torn between two women who represent two poles of his sexual desires (maybe pretty obvious to a contemporary reader but not so apparent to Hardy's contemporaries who focused on his attack on Oxbridge and on his so-called attack on the sanctity of marriage) - but Alvarez's concluding line was almost verbatim the same as I line with which I closed one of my posts. It's obvious why Jude was Hardy's final novel. As both AA and I said: He had nowhere else to go. (I might have added: but down.) Jude is the antithesis of a feel-good novel, about as dark as they come, particularly w/in the world of Victorian and late 19th-century English literature (Alvarez compares it w/ the opprobrium and controversy surrounding the publication of Chatterly - which I'd thought was a little later, but may well have been in the late 19th century). As to my reading - I guess there's nowhere to go but up. Tomorrow, most likely, on request from friend WS (not William Shakespeare), I may post on some suggested short stories or collections that fall outside of the conventions of the genre, which in the whole tends toward the sad, the stressed, the distressed, the obsessed, the lonely, and lost, and the outsiders. Are there story collections that, without pandering, help you recognize some good in the world? To be determined.