The Woodlanders

In the remote Wessex hamlet of Little Hintock, buried so deep in the woods that the wider world scarcely knows it exists, the timber-merchant’s daughter Grace Melbury comes home from a fashionable school — refined, accomplished, and raised fatally above the station she was born to.

Grace was long promised to Giles Winterborne, the steady young woodsman who has loved her all his life and who is at one with the orchards he tends and the trees he plants. But her father’s ambition, and her own new polish, draw her instead toward Edred Fitzpiers, the clever, restless, faithless village doctor. She marries him — and the marriage is barely made before Fitzpiers drifts into the arms of Felice Charmond, the worldly mistress of the local manor. Awakened too late to the worth of the man she was meant to marry, Grace turns back toward Giles, only to find the law will not free her, and that Giles’s own decency will cost him his life.

First serialized and published in 1887, The Woodlanders is the novel Hardy is said to have liked best of all his books as a story. Set among the planting and the cider-making of a single woodland village, it makes the forest itself a moral presence — vast, fertile, and indifferent — and weighs class and education, the cruelty of the divorce law, and fidelity against desire, giving its last and finest word to Marty South, the poor girl who loved Giles in silence.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.