The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

First published: serial, 1886-1887; book, 1887

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

Locale: Rural England

Principal characters

• George Melbury, a timber merchant
• Grace Melbury, his daughter
• Giles Winterborne, a traveling farmer
• Felice Charmond, a lady of the manor
• Edgar Fitzpiers, a doctor

The Story:

The timber merchant George Melbury spares no expense in educating his only daughter, Grace. She was away from home for one year, and he is eagerly awaiting her return. Giles Winterborne, a traveling farmer and apple grower, also looks forward to Grace’s homecoming. Mr. Melbury wronged Giles’s father many years before; to atone for this, he half promises Giles that he should have Grace for his wife.

When Grace returns, it is immediately evident that she is much too cultured and refined for the ways of a simple farmer. However, Grace knows that her father promised her to Giles, and she means to go through with it even though she shrinks a little from his plainness. Mr. Melbury is the most concerned. He is an honorable man and likes Giles, but he loves his only child above everything else. He cannot bear to see her throw herself away when she can marry better.

Giles agrees that he is not worthy of Grace, and so the three vacillate, no one wanting to make a decision. Then through a series of unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances, Giles loses the houses that ensured his livelihood. His loss decides the matter. Although Mr. Melbury can easily support them both, it is unthinkable that such a lady as Grace should be tied to a man without a steady income. However, when her father tells her that she must forget Giles, Grace finds herself for the first time thinking of her would-be lover with real affection.

The local doctor, Edgar Fitzpiers, is the descendant of a formerly fine family and in his own right a brilliant and charming man. The local folk thinks he consorts with the devil, for he performs many unusual experiments. From the first time that Edgar sees Grace, he is enchanted with her beauty and her bearing. At first, he thinks she must be the lady of the manor, Mrs. Charmond, for he cannot believe that the daughter of a merchant can be so well-educated and charming. Before long, the two young people meet, and Edgar asks Grace’s father for her hand. Mr. Melbury gladly gives his permission, for Edgar is far above Grace in position. Despite his sorrow at disappointing Giles and at failing to keep his pledge, Mr. Melbury encourages Grace to accept Edgar. She always obeys her father in all things, so she accepts Edgar even as she realizes that she is growing fonder of Giles by the day.

When the young couple return from a long honeymoon, they settle in a newly decorated wing of her father’s house. Edgar continues his practice. It grows alarmingly smaller, however, for the country folk who once looked up to him now consider him one of their own. He decides that perhaps he should accept a practice in a neighboring town.

Before he can make a final decision on this question, Mrs. Felice Charmond enters the picture. The lady of the manor is well known for her many love affairs and for her questionable reputation. When she has a slight accident and sends for Edgar, he is attracted to her immediately. The few scratches she suffers are enough to take him to her house day after day, until even the servants and farmers are talking about them. At last, Mr. Melbury decides he cannot stand idly by and see his daughter suffer; he appeals in person to Mrs. Charmond to leave Edgar alone. Grace herself is rather immune to the whole affair, for she does not care enough for her husband to suffer great jealousy.

The climax to the situation comes when Mr. Melbury finds Edgar after he is thrown from a horse near Mrs. Charmond’s home. Mr. Melbury picks him up and places him on his own mount, but Edgar is drunk and unaware that he is riding with his father-in-law. He berates Mr. Melbury and Grace as ignorant peasants and curses his ill luck in having married beneath himself. His drunken ravings are too much for the kindhearted merchant, who throws Edgar off the horse and rides away. When he comes to, Edgar, who was injured in the first fall, makes his way to Mrs. Charmond and begs her to hide him until he can travel. He must now leave the district; there can be no forgiveness for his many sins.

Mrs. Charmond leaves her home to travel on the Continent. Before long, there are rumors that Edgar is with her. Grace remains stoic. Unknown to her husband, she is aware that he had an affair with a peasant girl in the neighborhood before his marriage. She would let things stand, but an unscrupulous lawyer persuades her father that a new law will permit her to divorce Edgar. While he is making arrangements for the divorce, Mr. Melbury encourages both Giles and Grace to renew their old plans to marry. By that time, they are both sure that they love each other, but they are more cautious than Grace’s father. Thus when the word comes that she cannot be free of her husband, they are resigned to their unhappiness.

Grace and Giles do resume the friendship they knew since childhood, but decorously in all respects, for neither wishes a hint of scandal to touch the other. Many months later, Grace hears from her husband that he wants her to live with him again. Mrs. Charmond is dead, killed by a thwarted lover who afterward commits suicide. Edgar does not mention this fact, but a newspaper article informs them of the whole story. Grace and her father decide she should not meet Edgar as he asked, so he comes to their home.

When Grace hears Edgar approaching, she slips out of the house and runs into the woods. Stumbling and afraid, she comes at last to the hut occupied by Giles. Learning that she does not wish to see her husband, Giles installs her in his hut and goes out into the rain to sleep. What Grace does not know is that Giles is very ill of a fever, and a few days and nights in the cold rain make him desperately ill. When she finds her faithful friend so ill, she runs for Edgar, forgetting her desire not to see him in her anxiety for Giles. Edgar returns with her, but there is nothing to be done. Grace holds her love in her arms as he dies, seeming unaware that her husband is present.

For a long time, Grace will not listen to her husband’s pleas to return to him. She wants to hurt him as she was hurt, and she tells him that she and Giles lived together those last few days. Even before he learns that her self-accusation is not true, Edgar realizes that he truly loves her. When a man trap, set for Edgar by the husband of the peasant girl he once wronged, almost catches Grace in its steel jaws, Edgar helps his wife to safety. After he tells her that he bought a practice at a great distance from her old home and that he will be a faithful husband, devoting himself to her happiness, she goes away with him. She intends to be a good wife, but part of her remains with Giles in the country churchyard grave.

Bibliography

Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982. Comparison of contemporary notions of women with Hardy’s view. Includes a chapter on The Woodlanders, which notes elements of disparate genres and treats the novel’s self-consciousness and its echoes of pastoral elegy. Also points out the realistic treatment of sex and marriage.

Brooks, Jean R. Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971. Includes a chapter on The Woodlanders, which emphasizes the organic connection between plot and place. Stresses social hierarchies in comparison with natural environment. Lucid explication of characters and themes and of the interconnections of natural, human, and cosmic themes.

Daleski, H. M. Thomas Hardy and Paradoxes of Love. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Daleski reevaluates the treatment of gender in Hardy’s novels, defending the author from charges of sexism and maintaining that some of Hardy’s female characters are depicted sympathetically. Daleski argues that Hardy is the premodern precursor of sexual failures and catastrophic ends.

Kramer, Dale, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. An essential introduction and general overview of all Hardy’s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy’s ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy’s biography, aesthetics, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion, and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy’s life and Penny Boumelha’s essay “The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders.”

Kramer, Dale, and Nancy Marck, eds. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Helpful overview. Includes a chapter on The Woodlanders that synthesizes earlier criticism and analyzes divisions in characters that reflect Hardy’s conflicts. Stresses a strand of “secret humor” that keeps the novel realistic.

Mallett, Phillip, ed. The Achievement of Thomas Hardy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. A collection of essays that analyze some of the novels and other works and discuss Hardy and nature, the architecture of Hardy, and the presence of the poet in his novels, among other topics. Includes bibliography and index.

Moore, Kevin Z. The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Approaches Hardy’s relationship to and departure from Romanticism. Concludes that The Woodlanders represents William Wordsworth’s crossroads of British culture, where choices are forced between the culturally antithetical railway and the woodland.

Page, Norman, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. An encyclopedia containing three hundred alphabetically arranged entries examining Hardy’s work and discussing his family and friends, important places in his life and work, his influences, critical approaches to his writings, and a history of his works’ publication. Also includes a chronology of his life, lists of places and characters in his fiction, a glossary, and a bibliography.

Sumner, Rosemary. Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Analyzes the character of Grace Melbury as a divided woman, an educated woman in a static village. Points out that Hardy drew Grace with clinical precision. Also treats the “modern” elements of The Woodlanders and notes that surface conflicts reflect deeper divisions.

Tomalin, Claire. Thomas Hardy. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. This thorough and finely written biography by a respected Hardy scholar illuminates the novelist’s efforts to indict the malice, neglect, and ignorance of his fellow human beings. Tomalin also discusses aspects of his life that are apparent in his literary works.