The Woodlanders

A slow burner, the plot seemed to take a while to get going - and where was it going? Page by page the characters came to life unravelling the complexities of love and relationships in a rural background. Marty South stayed true until the end, Edreds will always keep his options open, Graces will always be grounded in their woodland upbringing and poor old Giles, ordinary, hardworking Giles - there will always be lots of those. What a tapestry, the ups and downs, caused by class, destiny and human nature, the emotions reflected in the changing seasons and the criss-crossing and tangles of the woodland paths. The introduction of the frightening agricultural man-trap near the end was a stroke of genius - whom would it catch, squeeze and show more bring down? Whom would it release? The mystery and tension remained taut until the end. show less

I was warned before I started reading this that Thomas Hardy is a miserable bastard. Four chapters in and he was comparing winter mornings to dead babies so I can't disagree.

This wasn't a happy book but I did enjoy it. Hardy's prose are beautiful and the way he describes the forests and apple orchards really brings the setting to live.

I liked the characters for the most part. There are two typically "good" and "moral" characters and both get the saddest endings with one dying and the other doomed to a life of loneliness, shackled by their own faithfulness.

There are no real "bad" characters. They're judgmental and selfish and they ruin their own lives and the lives of those around them by making the wrong choices. Even the main show more villains of the piece have fully human motivations and flaws.

But yeah, Hardy is one miserable bastard and this is one miserable book. show less

"There is a surgeon lately come—and I have heard that he reads a great deal—I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night."
     "Oh yes—a doctor—I believe I was told of him...... It is a strange place for him to settle in."
     "It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology, and metaphysics, and all sorts of subjects." (56)

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 show more 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!

added June 2019:
This is where it all started for me, you know. Way back in 2010, as a second-year graduate student, I read this novel for the first time in a seminar on Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf. As you see in my review from then above, I was intrigued by its depiction of a scientist, and how that scientist's behavior outside of science seemed to be affected by his scientific training. I went seeking a source that could tell me more about this-- and I never found one. So now I am writing one, revising my dissertation project into an academic monograph. One of the sample chapters I want to send in with my proposal is the one that includes The Woodlanders, and I haven't read the book since I took that class almost ten years ago, and now I need to revise it. I am sure that that part of the book needs work, since I have (hopefully) advanced as a writer and scholar in the past ten years.

What I had not remembered is how much Fitzpiers is an off-stage presence at the beginning of the novel. It initially seems like it might be about Marty South, daughter of a rural woodsman, but soon focuses on Grace Melbury, daughter of a timber-merchant, and whether she should marry Giles Winterbourne, another local woodsman, now that's she's been elevated by a middle-class education out of town. Fitzpiers is spoken of from p. 8 onwards, glimpsed on p. 60, but does not properly appear until p. 92, almost a third of the way through the novel. We hear a lot about him before he appears so, as in the above quotation. We're told he reads Spinoza (45), and that he has widespread interests (56), and that he has paid the Melburys' servant, Grammer Oliver, ten pounds so that he can have her brain after she dies-- he is intrigued because her head is the size of a man's (46). The locals both do and do not trust this highly educated doctor, whose like they don't normally see in a place like Little Hintock. Some think he studies black arts and sold his soul to the devil... but they kind of like that, because the worse the person, the better the doctor! (28) The other local doctor is so nice, he won't even give you foul-tasting medicine, so obviously it's not actually doing anything.

But it turns out that a bad man is a bad doctor. Like other too-educated surgeons in rural communities (e.g., Thurnall in Two Years Ago, Lydgate in Middlemarch), he struggles to build much of a practice; he's certainly no Mr. Gibson from Wives and Daughters. When he suggests treating Marty's father, who is being driven mad by a tree, by chopping down the tree, Marty's dad dies. Worse than the outcome of the experiment is his highly casual reaction to the loss of a man's life, as he seizes the opportunity to ask Giles about a hot chick he saw the other day:

Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and came; but uselessly. He [Mr. South] lingered through the day, and died that evening as the sun went down.
     "Damned if my remedy hasn't killed him!" murmured the doctor.
     Dismissing the subject he went downstairs. When going out of the house he turned suddenly to Giles and said, "Who was that young lady we looked at over the hedge the other day?"
     Giles shook his head, as if he did not remember. (94)

Later, Fitzpiers gets some of Mr. South's brain, and it's while looking at a sample of it that Grace first starts to fall for him!

Fitzpiers's case is more complicated than many of the ones I look at, though, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Fitzpiers is a would-be scientist, but as I've said, his interests are diverse: he also studies philosophy, and French romances, and so on. This dilettantism is what's consistent across both his personal and intellectual lives. He wants to do experiments, but cannot follow them through to completion. He falls in love with Grace, but is interested in not only her. Does this mean Hardy thinks he would be a better person if he stuck to science? Then it would seem that science is not the culprit, not entirely, but I don't find this entirely satisfying. Which I guess is appropriate, because the end-- where Fitzpiers resolves to stick to Grace this time-- is not entirely satisfying either. show less

The Woodlanders was published in 1887 and it is reflective of its time. The story centers around life in Little Hintock, a fictional village in rural England. Grace Melbury, the only child of a timber-merchant, is returning home after being educated in the city. Her father has paid for a higher education to enable her to rise above her social station and marry well. She has been courted by local resident Giles Winterbourne, but when his situation deteriorates, their bond is broken. She is then noticed by a physician, Dr. Fitzpiers, who initially sees her as not quite “good enough” due to his higher social standing, but is won over by her education, cleverness, and charm. A wealthy widow complicates the relationship between Dr. show more Fitzpiers and Grace, leading to unhappiness for everyone involved.

This book is a classic Victorian novel. The pastoral setting is vividly described. It contains long descriptive sentences with somewhat archaic construction, requiring some re-reading along the way. It is focused on the characters, and their interactions and motivations. There is not much in the way of “action” especially the way “action” is emphasized in contemporary fiction. It is well-constructed and flows pleasantly. Hardy has something to say about happiness, such as finding it in a simple and honest life and being content with what we have. Hardy employs themes typical of his novels, such as marital fidelity, social class, the erosion of values that come with “progress,” and unsuitably matched pairs. He appears to take issue with the way women were typically treated and examines the double standards of the time. Hardy provides hints of upcoming events and outcomes through the use of snippets of quotes from prominent poets and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

I enjoy reading about life in the 19th century from those that lived it. While we can always read historical fiction written in current times, it is particularly insightful to read it from a point of view of someone who never knew life in its modern form, where carriages and horses were modes of transportation, candles or lanterns used as sources of light, and goods were hand-made. It is apparent in reading this novel that even though technology and change have made the world into a much different place, human nature remains much the same. Recommended to those that enjoy Victorian-era literature. show less

Another Hardy character to rival Sue Bridehead in emotional complexity is, I feel, Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders. Grace is the young country girl sent away by her vain and ambitious father to be educated and refined and when she returns we see how the natural order of a small rural community is irrevocably turned upside down as a result. Hardy explores the impact of education and money on Grace and the way these influences affect those around her. Grace is forced by her control-freak of a father to marry the middle-class philanderer Edred Fitzpiers, and thus reject the young local man whom she had expected to marry - the taciturn woodlander, Giles Winterbourne, who 'looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother'. Grace's marriage to show more Fitzpiers is a disaster which leads to the normal order being drastically altered. Grace's development is handled with remarkable sensitivity and shrewdness by Hardy. Unable to secure a divorce from Fitzpiers, Grace reaches an accommodating agreement on her own terms. In her journey she has been alternately on the receiving end of a controlling parent, an abusive husband and the adoring Winterbourne who effectively sacrifices his life for her.

During her emotional development, Grace, I believe, finds physical and emotional comfort with her rival, Felice Charmond, in an unusual encounter which hints at a higher form of human affection than the 'conventional' heterosexual trysts elsewhere (notably Fitzpiers' seduction of the buxom Suke Damson). As they take shelter from the threatening forest, Grace is en-wrapped in the arms of one who needs her and trusts her implicitly. Does Hardy show Grace gaining more emotional fulfillment with those of her own sex? The possibilities are couched in the literary mores of the day but tantalisingly glimpsed all the same. This is a book which I believe challenges sexual conventions - where Hardy shows the hidden depths and complexities of human sexuality; where easy sexual labels are replaced by the 'sublimity...loftier quality of abstract humanism.'

I don't think Grace elicits the reader's sympathy in the way that Sue Bridehead does. The link between the two is the burgeoning conflict between their social status, their acquired education and the messy business of human sexuality. Grace certainly doesn't exude sex appeal and Giles, to his tragic cost, remains in love with the ideal of her girlhood. He cannot love this newly discovered flesh and blood although a forlorn encounter between the two sees him awaken to her sexually in a brief gesture that strikes against her recently gained superiority.

Grace, I feel, isn't even a very likable character but there is something tough and ineluctably modern in the woman she becomes - the de-fanging of her menfolk in different ways - the overbearing father cast adrift, the errant husband brought to heel and the romantic lover of her youth consigned to the grave. Underneath the coy exterior is a complex human being whom Hardy lets us glimpse but who cannot be boxed in any certainties. show less

[b:The Woodlanders|341281|The Woodlanders|Thomas Hardy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389977312l/341281._SY75_.jpg|2502604] is written in the moody, sometimes downcast, style of Thomas Hardy’s more famous novels, [b:Tess of the D'Urbervilles|32261|Tess of the D'Urbervilles|Thomas Hardy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434302708l/32261._SY75_.jpg|3331021] and [b:Jude the Obscure|50798|Jude the Obscure|Thomas Hardy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389403264l/50798._SY75_.jpg|41342119], with the romantic flavor that defines [b:Far From the Madding Crowd|31463|Far From the Madding Crowd|Thomas show more Hardy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388279695l/31463._SY75_.jpg|914540]. It becomes obvious early on that Giles Winterborne and Grace Melbury are not to have a smooth course to love, although their youthful attachment and her father's approval should have pointed to the fact that they would. The presence of a new doctor in the district, Doctor Fitzpiers; the mysterious landlady at the manor, Mrs. Chamond; and the natural beauty, Marty Smart, round out the cast and push forward the calamitous events that are to come.

The battle between frost and thaw was continuing in mid-air; the trees dripped on the garden-plots, where no vegetables would grow for the dripping, though they were planted year after year with that curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face of hopelessness…

Thomas Hardy is a wizard when he speaks of the connection of man to nature, it echoes the events in the lives of his characters, perhaps God's commentary on what mankind conceives. He so often writes in a Romantic tradition, seeing nature as the purer, moral path, and the decline in rural society as a deterioration of the world at large. The pure characters in this novel are Giles Winterborne and Marty Smart, and the descriptions of the two of them in their natural labor are some of the most riveting passages in the story. It must say a great deal about Hardy’s view of the world that the semi-villainous Fitzpier ends in better stead than either of them at the end of the novel. Alas, in life and in Hardy, good does not often prevail.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

I wonder if it is the romantic or the melancholy side of me that loves Hardy so much. His view of the world we live in is not rosy and sometimes downright bleak, and yet he shows us glimpses of goodness and the possibility of happiness--for there is often a path to happiness that his characters shun, and a very few of them come to destinations that might result in some redemption. Often it is simply a lack of self-awareness or an inability to communicate their feelings that land them in their terrible circumstances; and which of us cannot relate to those moments in life?

Every time I start a Hardy novel I think, “this one will not live up to the others”, but as it progresses, I revise that thought, for Hardy always builds toward a gripping climax and never makes you feel you have wasted your time with his characters or been handed a mediocre plot. I have one more Hardy on my required reading for this year...with any luck I can add another before the end of 2020 and make it three.


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Every bit as lovely as I remembered it. My view of this as my favourite Hardy is only confirmed, even if my recent splurge of rapid reading slowed down dramatically as I was reading it. The first two thirds took a couple of days, the remainder has been spun over two weeks simply because of time pressures and because this is a book that demands not to be read superficially in small doses, but needs to wait for time to be allocated to it.

It's less melodramatic than some of Hardy's better-known novels, and it doesn't have the same huge Wessex landscapes against which the smallness of human existence is contrasted. Instead, its setting is confined to one small part of West Dorset, a suffocating micro-world hemmed in and overshadowed by show more trees. Within this prison, Hardy documents a centuries-old agrarian society which was already dying, its inhabitants as much allegory as beautifully-constructed flesh-and-blood. In this world are Giles and Marty, people who live by the trees and have done for generations, frozen like the figures on Keats's urn, never quite to find each other for the love to which they are surely destined. From outside come the strangers, Dr Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond, as sophisticated, superficial and uncomfortable with this introverted world as the century coming over the horizon. And they would stay apart but for a fifth person, Grace Melbury, with a foot in both camps thanks to her socially ambitious father. She is the catalyst for explosive changes.

The Woodlanders was published in the year of Victoria's jubilee, a time of supreme confidence in the world. In that context, Hardy's sense of Greek tragedy, of hubristic protagonists struck down by the gods, seems particularly perspications. But there are no simple morals in this story; the ending is ambiguous, the apparent gloom and bleakness shot through with dry wit marking Hardy a kind of Leonard Cohen of the Victorian novel (Giles, who has little time for God, strops his knife on a leather-bount psalter), The book is surprisingly modernist in feel, anticipating not only James and Lawrence but the cinema. show less