When country-girl Grace Melbury returns home from her middle-class school she feels she has risen above her suitor, the simple woodsman Giles Winterborne. Though marriage had been discussed between her and Giles, Grace finds herself captivated by Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, a sophisticated newcomer to the area - a relationship that is encouraged by her socially ambitious father. Hardy's novel of betrayal, disillusionment and moral compromise depicts a secluded community coming to terms with the disastrous impact of outside influences. And in his portrayal of Giles Winterborne, Hardy shows a man who responds deeply to the forces of the natural world, thought they ultimately betray him.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Foreshadowing Tess
Comment: The Woodlanders is said to be one of Hardy's more descriptive novels and Hardy is also said to have a love for this part of the country. I thought this was a beautiful passage:

"From the other window all she could see were more trees, jacketed with lichen and stockinged with moss. At their roots were stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than stool. Next were more trees close together, wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows. It was the struggle between these neighbors that she had heard in the night. Beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the group that had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like decayed teeth from green gums. Farther on were other tufts of moss in islands divided by the shed leaves--variety upon variety, dark green and pale green; moss-like little fir-trees, like plush, like malachite stars, like nothing on earth except moss."

And this description of Winterborne as a wood-god really stood out for me:

"He rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as she had seen him among the sappy boughs of the plantations; sometimes cider-stained, and with apple-pips in the hair of his arms, as she had met him on his return from cider-making in White Hart Vale, with his vats and presses beside him."

It is said that Winterborne was a creation derived from Hardy's own father.

The book also has the typical Hardy realism and tragedy based on innocence and wrong choices, the unfair position of women, mere chance, or should I say Chance, in keeping with the way Hardy uses it. For me, somehow, the more descriptive nature of the book, while not that descriptive--Hardy is a realist not a romantic, gave the book a hazy, almost somnolent quality that almost distracted from the clarity and meaning of the book. Maybe it was Hardy's intention to have the woods form a kind of shadowy hold over the characters, the readers--there's the strange effect a single tree had on Winterborne's father, and another on Grace. But Hardy's description of the moors in Return of the Native had more power for me. Also, the characters seemed undeveloped to me, especially Grace, who was a main character. Marty seemed more real, though maybe that was intentional as the book ends with her, and poor Grace floated un-fixedly in the non-place between two classes.

I love Hardy's novels and poetry otherwise I may have given it 3 stars. I just read it--it may be I need to ruminate on it for awhile.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Visit Wessex in the Woodlanders and Savor the prose of Thomas Hardy
Comment: The Woodlanders is the eleventh novel by Thomas Hardy. Hardy takes us to an obscure village in his mythical Wessex. The novel portrays the beautiful Grace Melbury a nubile young miss coddled by her parents; eager for glamour and disdainful of bucolic boredom. Grace is courted by Giles Winterbourne a local rustic but cast him off to wed Dr. Edred Fitzpiers the local doctor. The marriage is a disaster for Fitzper lusts for Madame Charmond. He also has a fling with Suke a local girl.
Fitzpiers flees to the Continent while Grace seeks reconciliation with
Winterborne. The couple hope to wed under a newly passed Parliamentary
law dealing with the right of women to obtain a divorce.
All goes wrong. Accidents occur as chance and fortune always play a part in the Hardy world. The novel does end happily which is rare for Hardy.
Hardy knew the English countryside as it moved from spring to winter.
His description of nature is beautifully written. Hardy also knew the south of England as it was moving from the rural nineteenth century to the modern world of the coming twentieth century.
The Woodlanders is one of the lesser known Hardy novels that is well worth your attention. The story is well told with many interesting and exciting plot developments which will hold the attention. Well recommended.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: NOT PART OF THE "BIG 5" EH...WELL MAKE IT THE "BIG 6!"
Comment: The Woodlanders (1887) is one of Thomas Hardy's finest novels, which deals with doomed love in a gloomy rural "partly real and partly dream" country of Wessex.

It is one of Hardy's favorite and if Hardy liked it, I do to, especially since I have never read this novel....I liked The Return of the Native...

THE BIG 6

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD -1874
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE - 1878
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE - 1886
THE WOODLANDERS - 1887
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES - 1891
JUDE THE OBSCURE - 1895

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Disaster at the altar in the church of Hardy.
Comment: "It would have made a beautiful story," Thomas Hardy said about this novel, "if I could have carried out my idea of it; but somehow I come so far short of my intention."

"I wish you had never thought of educating me," Thomas Hardy's protagonist tells her father at one point in this novel, "because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles" (pp. 232-33). Hardy (1840-1928) wrote his eleventh novel in 1887, before his better-known masterpieces, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) and JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895), and a year after THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (1886). Set in the "partly real and partly dream country" of Hardy's Wessex, in the "sequestered" forest community of Little Hintock (located "outside the gates of the world," p. 6), a place where "loneliness is not so very lonely after a while" (p. 83), THE WOODLANDERS is about doomed love, betrayal, and social restraints, and like Hardy's other work, it succeeds as a satisfying story of a romantic disaster in Hardy's cruel universe. The novel tells the sad tale of a woman, Grace Melbury, forced to choose marriage between two suitors of different social statures, Giles Winterborne, a local woodlander with a gentle, virtuous nature, and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious doctor and a scoundrel. Influenced by her well-intentioned though meddling father, Mr. Melbury, who only wants his daughter to "marry well" (p. 89), Grace's decision ultimately leads to disastrous consequences and, in the end, to a lonely woman worshipping at a dead man's grave. Once again, we discover the course of love is never happy in Hardy's universe.

Rather gloomy for a Victorian romance novel? Well, yes. But reading Victorian fiction does not get any better than reading Thomas Hardy's extraordinary novels. Returning to Hardy's brooding, melancholy fiction after my first encounter with his novels more than twenty five years ago, I am re-discovering Hardy's brilliant ability to convey familiar, primordial truths through his fiction, making him worth reading again and again.

G. Merritt

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hardy gone berserk
Comment: Hardy classified THE WOODLANDERS with his Novels of Character and Ingenuity, which category included his very best novels (TESS, THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE). This 1887 novel is so bizarre, however, that you might feel it belongs more properly with his Romances and Fantasies. In the secluded rustic community of Little Hintock all manner of things are a-brewing: simple Marty South has a thing for cider-merchant Giles Winterbourne, who has been promised for years to marry well-educated Grace Melbury, but Grace's father marries her off instead to philandering Edred Fitzpiers, who has a thing for local wealthy widow Felice Charmond. In this circle of desire all manner of things can go wrong--and, this being Hardy, of course they do. Some of his wildest plot contrivances (including two bizarre scenes wherein the Widow Charmond must convey crucial information to Grace, and Fitzpiers even more crucial information to Grace's father) occur without the redeeming Shakespearean scope of a novel like THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE which allows you to overlook the wackiness. Still, even if this is lesser Hardy, it's still Hardy, so the novel has such poetically gorgeous evocations of landscape and character as to make everything worthwhile in the end.

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