The Woodlanders

by Keith Carabine (Editor), Thomas Hardy

Overview

Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock after an expensive education and her father looks to find a husband for her. There are two rivals for her hand: Giles Winterborne, a good-hearted yeoman and her childhood sweetheart, and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious young doctor of good family. Fitzpiers wins her, but the mismatch brings unhappiness not just to the young couple, but to a wider circle in the woodland community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853262937
Publisher:	Wordsworth Editions, Limited
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Series:	Classics Library Series
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	4.97(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Thomas Hardy, whose writing immortalized the Wessex countryside and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, was born at Upper Bockhampton, near Stinsford in Dorset in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonemason. As a youth he trained as an architect and in 1862 obtained a post in London. During his time he began seriously to write poetry, which remained his first literary love and his last. In 1867-68, his first novel was refused publication, butUnder the Greenwood Tree (1872), his first Wessex novel, did well enough to convince him to continue writing. In 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd, published serially and anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, became a great success. Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1878, and in 1885 they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life. There he had wrote The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

With Tess, Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the “infidelity” and “obscenity” of this great novel he had subtitled “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.” Jude the Obscure aroused even greater indignation and was denounced as pornography. Hardy’s disgust at the reaction to Jude led him to announce in 1869 that he would never write fiction ever again. He published Wessex Poems in 1898, Poems of the Past and Present in 1901, and from 1903 to 1908, The Dynast, a huge drama in which Hardy’ s conception of the Immanent Will, implicit in the tragic novels, is most clearly stated.

In 1912 Hardy’s wife, Emma died. The marriage was childless and had been a troubled one, but in the years after her death, Hardy memorialized her in several poems. At seventy-four he married his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale, herself a writer of children’s books and articles, with whom he live happily until his death in 1928. His heart was buried in the Wessex Countryside; his ashes were placed next to Charles Dickens’s in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements		vi	(1)
General Editor's Preface		vii	(3)
Chronology: Hardy's Life and Works		x	(4)
Map: The Wessex of the Novels		xiv	(1)
Bibliographical Note		xv	(1)
Introduction		xvi	(19)
Further Reading		xxxv	(2)
A Note on the History of the Text		xxxvii
THE WOODLANDERS		1	(367)
Appendix I: 1895 Preface; 1912 Postscript		368	(3)
Appendix II: The Location of The Woodlanders		371	(5)
Appendix III: The Law, Marriage and Divorce in The Woodlanders		376	(4)
Notes		380	(35)
Glossary		415

Editorial Reviews

The finest English novel.”—Arnold Bennett

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