The Woodlanders

A stranger in finical city dress loses his way on a lonely coach-road through the woods and orchards of Hintock, where Thomas Hardy sets a secluded rural world alive with gossip, labor, and hidden feeling. The man proves to be Barber Percombe, carrying a mysterious errand that leads him by Mrs. Dollery's market van into Little Hintock and to the cottage of Marty South, a gifted young thatcher with a guarded pride in her one beauty: her hair. Percombe tries to buy it for the elegant Mrs. Charmond, but Marty refuses, even as her ailing father's worries and the family's precarious life sharpen the scene's sense of pressure and vulnerability. Hardy then threads together duty, desire, and old wrongs. Marty's night labor and endurance contrast with the drawing-room ambitions of George Melbury, who confesses his plan to restore an old injustice by making Grace marry Giles Winterborne. Yet Grace has instead married the cultivated Dr. Fitzpiers, and her uneasy reunion with Winterborne exposes lingering heartbreak, class division, and the cost of altered lives. When the couple return to Hintock, warmth and local hospitality mask deeper tensions, as gossip, memory, and divided loyalties gather beneath the novel's quiet rural surface. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.