The Woodlanders [Hardcover]

Thomas Hardy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001 | ISBN-10: 1582871418 | ISBN-13: 978-1582871417

For centuries Little Hintock has been sustained by the surrounding woodland. Now the villagers are caught up in a web of consuming emotion: the unspoken love of Mary South for Giles Winterbourne; his devotion to Grace Melbury; and the troubled relationship between Grace and Edred Fitzpiers.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 401 pages
• Publisher: North Books (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582871418
• ISBN-13: 978-1582871417
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,696,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the best ever book about nature., May 25, 2000

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Woodlanders Thomas Hardy (Everyman's Library (Paper)) (Paperback)

Hardy is my favourite poet, but I've always found the novels hard-going, too determinedly grim, too schematically fatalistic. For the first third of this novel, I felt the samme way, dutifully admiring the prose, but not really enjoying. Then I left it for a few months, read Proust, and came back to it. I started kicking myself.

It's a masterpiece, an absolute joy for two reasons. Not the characters, who rarely rise above their stock roles - the decent, honourable heroine impossibly torn between passion and propriety; the manly, back-to-nature hero, who could come straight from COLD COMFORT FARM); the impoverished aristocratic cad; his wealthy lover, the promiscuous bored ex-actress golddigger; the bumbling middle-class trader of lowly origins.

What astonishes first is Hardy's plot, related by a weirdly troubling narrator, awesomely intricate in itself, but full of an almost Nabokovian sadism. Situations, desires, hopes are set up and cruelly dashed as the beautiful narrative machinations begin cranking - the man-trap scene had me literally sweating. This irony, however, also has an emotional effect, as it reveals characters trapped by the social, gender and psychological limits the plot symbolises, and forces them into a humanity beyond their stereotype.

Mostly, though, this is a novel written by a poet, and in its animation of the sexually charged woods, the lanes, glades, fields, sunsets, dawns, storms, drizzles, winds, breezes, nature is the book's true hero, full of almost supernatural agency. Hardy's gifts of description, his unearthing the unearthly, the uncanny, the inexplicable beneath the surface, are unsurpassed in Victorian fiction; while his non-didactic anger at social injustice is so much more compelling than the more literal Dickens'.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly lovely, January 15, 2000

By 

Kate - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Woodlanders (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) (Hardcover)

This is one of my favourite Hardy novels. As some others have noted, it's not one of the "big 5" but certainly worth reading. Hardy's descriptions of the woodlands are beautiful, and I found the ending to be one of his most unpredictable. I wouldn't recommend reading it if you are feeling down, as the ending is sooooo wonderfully tragic (hehe), or if you're not a fan of Hardy's prose style, but otherwise it's a wonderful read. Very personal as well. I got the feeling it was written just for me :)

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lesser known gem of English literature, October 16, 2001

By 

Charles Ryder (Tokyo) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Woodlanders (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

It's easy to see how Thomas Hardy became a wonderful poet after his long career of writing novels, given the meaty prose and superb scenery he conjured in "The Woodlanders." Tales of matrimonial and unrequited love compete for space amongst the bounty of Hardy's described woods, heaths and vales. "Woodlanders" offers some of the most complex and well-developed characters of Hardy's novelistic pantheon. Yet such stories of amor et fides, honor and self-sacrifice quickly become a backdrop when Hardy reaches for the woods of his mind.