The Woodlanders (1887)

I really liked this book by Hardy although it seems like the romances are never going to come to fruition.

Grace Melbury is the only daughter of a well-off woodsman in the hamlet of Little Hintock and he has paid a good deal of money to educate her, thus raising her beyond the station of her parents and neighbours. Grace was somewhat promised to Giles Winterborne, an orchardist and cider maker in the hamlet. Mr. Melbury had married the woman that Giles' father loved and he thought that it would make amends if his daughter and Giles got married. When Grace comes home from school her father wonders if she can be happy married to such a common man and living in such a small place. He then learns that the new doctor in the village, Mr. Fitzpiers, has taken a shine to Grace. A professional man would make a far better match for Grace, her father thinks. Giles agrees to give up Grace and Grace and Fitzpiers get married. However Fitzpiers has a wandering eye and after dallying with a local girl before marriage he has an affair with the local gentrywoman, Felice Charmond, after marriage.

Giles is beloved by another local girl, Marty South, but even though Giles is free it doesn't seem that he is interested in Marty. Perhaps things might have worked out for them if Fitzpiers had not left Grace to cross to the continent with Mrs. Charmond. That perhaps opens up the possibility of Grace being free to remarry after divorcing Fitzpiers.

Giles is such an honourable man and Fitzpiers is such a bounder. Grace discovers, too late, that Giles would have been the better choice. Because, this being Hardy, there is tragedy and Giles and Grace are permanently parted.

I really loved the setting and the details of the woodman's craft (although I didn't understand a great deal of it). It made me wonder if there are any areas of woodland left in England. Sadly, it doesn't seem that there is. I found a website for ( )

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Woodlanders. I could never get into Tess, and was only moderately interested in Under the Greenwood Tree.

My literary home-ground is 19th century England. It just is, I can't help it. And this is bucolic 19th century England - a place where the towering canopy of trees is almost always present - sunshine through the leaves, and tiny cottages underneath them housing people with little education, small horizons, and skilled calloused hands. As far as I can tell, Hardy is the (romanticised) voice of these people, as Dickens was for the city-poor. (So the authors had a literary home-ground too).

It's a story about one's 'rightful place', and about love, which is a typical combination of Victorian literary themes. It's told with simplicity, and with some beautiful passages of prose that made me stop in my tracks and read over again with joy. The characters are fresh and well-drawn, though it took more than half the book for Grace to develop much of a personality. Various people make wrong choices for the best reasons, and, this being Hardy, tragedy and sorrow are pretty evenly distributed to everyone. I was interested to find, though, that it didn't end where I would have expected it to end, but kept going for a while, bringing what was for me an unexpected new development, which I rather liked.

This was apparently Hardy's own favourite of all his novels, and I for one certainly value it much more than Tess of the D'Urbevilles. It's inspired me enough to raise some of his other novels higher on my To Read list.

This is the 4th Thomas Hardy book I've read. Interestingly I love them while I'm reading them but in less than a month I can barely remember the plots. They always deal with the picturesque beautiful countryside and simple folk's ways being upturned by the big bad city people creeping into their town.
In The Woodlanders, Grace's father decides to educate her, but then she is too good for everyone around her so she marries Giles, the city doctor who is working in their village. Everything falls apart and Grace and her father both regret her education and the loss of their idyllic life. Same theme as the other Hardy books I've read. ( )

I've read this Hardy novel several times. I don't seem to tire of Giles' pathetic and heroic devotion. ( )

This is Hardy's third variation on the same theme I've read after Far From the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native: a tangled web of romance and lust that consumes a community. But it's also the most successful variation; I was totally absorbed in this one in a way that I wasn't with the other two. I think that Hardy has succeeded here in creating balanced, real characters that let him maintain sympathy even while they do unsympathetic things. My favorite character was Marty South, who the first chapter pretends is going to be the protagonist (I'd've gladly read a novel about her), but even the ostensible "villains" of the piece are engaging. It's also one of the more gripping Hardy novels I've read; there were so many points where I was entranced, and others where I was genuinely worried that some was or would be hurt.

I also found the character of Dr. Edred Fitzpiers fascinating. He's a scientist as well as a surgeon, but that's his problem: he spends too much time dealing with "useless" abstract information, unlike the pseudo-hero of the novel, a naturalist named Giles. But his need to experiment and find knowledge for knowledge's sake doesn't just condemn him professionally, it also bleeds over into his personal life and condemns him there. I feel like there's some discomfort with the emerging figure of the scientist being expressed here. It probably doesn't help that he keeps on trying to buy people's brains, though. Not just a scientist, but a mad scientist!