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    The Woodlanders
    The Woodlanders
    The Woodlanders
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Woodlanders

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Stephen Thorne

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Woodlanders is vintage Hardy. The story revolves around the young woman Grace Melbury, who returns to the leafy world of Little Hintock and soon finds herself at the centre of a number of tragic events. In penetrating, incisive and beautiful prose, Hardy tells a moving tale of unrequited love as fate and the constraints of society thwart the happiness of our heroine. The leafy world of Blackmoor Vale and the hamlet of Little Hintock are all lovingly described by Hardy, who named The Woodlanders as the favourite of all his novels; upon re-reading it 25 years after its publication, he claimed, with certainty, it was the book he liked ‘best of all’.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJun 30, 2014
    ISBN9781843798163
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.

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    Reviews for The Woodlanders

    4/5

    418 ratings30 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be an excellent and beautiful classic. The book handles the prose expertly and the characters' dialogue with feeling and warmth. It is highly recommended and worth reading. The tale is tragic and compelling, exploring themes of love, loss, and life. The engaging cast of characters, social commentary, and evocative descriptions of rural life make this book a must-read. The reader does justice to the book, making the reader feel like they are in the story.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Good light reading.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful, tragic, and compelling tale of love, loss and life.
    • 5/5
      The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy; (4 1/2*)This is the eleventh novel by Thomas Hardy. He takes us to an obscure village in his mythical Wessex. The novel portrays the beautiful Grace Melbury, a lovely young lady spoiled and well educated by her parents, eager for glamour and disdainful of the boredom of woodland folk. Grace is courted by Giles Winterbourne, a local woodsman, but casts him aside to wed Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, the local doctor. The marriage turns out poorly for Grace as the doctor is a womanizer and quite ignores his wife.Fitzpiers flees to the Continent while Grace seeks reconciliation with Winterborne. The couple hope to wed under a newly passed Parliamentary law dealing with the right of women to obtain a divorce.However it all goes wrong. Accidents occur as chance and fortune always play a part in the Hardy world. The novel does end happily which is a rarity for Hardy.Hardy knew the English countryside as it moved from spring to winter and describes it so beautifully that we come to know it as well. His description of nature is beautifully written. He also knew the south of England as it was moving from the rural nineteenth century to the modern world of the coming twentieth century.This novel is one of the lesser known Hardy novels but it is well worth your time and attention. The story is well told with many interesting and exciting plot developments which will hold the attention of the reader.I highly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Hardy at his best: an engaging cast of characters, drama, social commentary, gentle irony, and evocative descriptions of rural life and landscape. The reader is excellent and truly does justice to the book.
    • 5/5
      Generally excellent if old fashioned reading of an underrated classic. Handles the heavier prose expertly and the dialogue of the characters with feeling and warmth.
      Unmissable for fans of English lit and classical scale characterisation. Educational on the relations between the sexes and how susceptible they can be to social and societal influence.
    • 4/5
      The novel reflects common Hardy themes: a rustic, evocative setting, poorly chosen marriage partners, unrequited love, social class mobility, and an unhappy, or at best equivocal, ending. As with most his other works, opportunities for fulfillment and happiness are forsaken or delayed. The plot was very credible and the characters were well developed. It had a very sad ending but very fitting for the circumstances. I would recommend this book if you have enjoyed some of this other writings.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful in every way! Highly recommended and well worth it.
    • 4/5
      This is classic Hardy at its best. The way he pens the narrative makes the reader feel like they are in the story.
    • 4/5
      The Woodlanders was published in 1887 and it is reflective of its time. The story centers around life in Little Hintock, a fictional village in rural England. Grace Melbury, the only child of a timber-merchant, is returning home after being educated in the city. Her father has paid for a higher education to enable her to rise above her social station and marry well. She has been courted by local resident Giles Winterbourne, but when his situation deteriorates, their bond is broken. She is then noticed by a physician, Dr. Fitzpiers, who initially sees her as not quite “good enough” due to his higher social standing, but is won over by her education, cleverness, and charm. A wealthy widow complicates the relationship between Dr. Fitzpiers and Grace, leading to unhappiness for everyone involved.

      This book is a classic Victorian novel. The pastoral setting is vividly described. It contains long descriptive sentences with somewhat archaic construction, requiring some re-reading along the way. It is focused on the characters, and their interactions and motivations. There is not much in the way of “action” especially the way “action” is emphasized in contemporary fiction. It is well-constructed and flows pleasantly. Hardy has something to say about happiness, such as finding it in a simple and honest life and being content with what we have. Hardy employs themes typical of his novels, such as marital fidelity, social class, the erosion of values that come with “progress,” and unsuitably matched pairs. He appears to take issue with the way women were typically treated and examines the double standards of the time. Hardy provides hints of upcoming events and outcomes through the use of snippets of quotes from prominent poets and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

      I enjoy reading about life in the 19th century from those that lived it. While we can always read historical fiction written in current times, it is particularly insightful to read it from a point of view of someone who never knew life in its modern form, where carriages and horses were modes of transportation, candles or lanterns used as sources of light, and goods were hand-made. It is apparent in reading this novel that even though technology and change have made the world into a much different place, human nature remains much the same. Recommended to those that enjoy Victorian-era literature.
    • 3/5
      This melodramatic tale is not up to par with Hardy's four big classics, but it's worth a read if you're a fan of the author.
      Grace Melbury has been effectively engaged to Giles Winterborne for years. But Grace has been sent off to school for a better education, while Giles has stayed in the tiny village of Little Hintock and worked his apple cidering trade. Grace's father is concerned that she will never be satisfied with the rural life Giles can provide for her, and indeed, Grace is worried about that too, although she cares deeply for him. Upon being wooed by the dashing and flirtatious Dr. Fitzpiers, the engagement is broken off and Grace marries the young doctor. A doctor who is no sooner married than he is off wooing a different woman.
      There are several other local characters tied up in this tangled story of love, betrayal, and infidelity, but these are the primary ones. One of the reasons I've loved Hardy's "big four" is the mood of the rural English countryside at the end of the 18th century. Little was devoted to the setting in The Woodlanders. Hardy dives almost instantly into the plot, and sticks with that almost enirely, leaving the setting to whatever the reader imagines. For me, this made it a weaker, less enjoyable novel.
    • 5/5
      A slow burner, the plot seemed to take a while to get going - and where was it going? Page by page the characters came to life unravelling the complexities of love and relationships in a rural background. Marty South stayed true until the end, Edreds will always keep his options open, Graces will always be grounded in their woodland upbringing and poor old Giles, ordinary, hardworking Giles - there will always be some of those. What a tapestry, the ups and downs, caused by class, destiny and human nature, the emotions reflected in the changing seasons and the criss-crossing and tangles of the woodland paths. The introduction of the frightening agricultural man-trap near the end was a stroke of genius - whom would it catch, squeeze and bring down? Whom would it release? The mystery and tension remained taut until the end.
    • 4/5
      Another Hardy character to rival Sue Bridehead in emotional complexity is, I feel, Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders. Grace is the young country girl sent away by her vain and ambitious father to be educated and refined and when she returns we see how the natural order of a small rural community is irrevocably turned upside down as a result. Hardy explores the impact of education and money on Grace and the way these influences affect those around her. Grace is forced by her control-freak of a father to marry the middle-class philanderer Edred Fitzpiers, and thus reject the young local man whom she had expected to marry - the taciturn woodlander, Giles Winterbourne, who 'looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother'. Grace's marriage to Fitzpiers is a disaster which leads to the normal order being drastically altered. Grace's development is handled with remarkable sensitivity and shrewdness by Hardy. Unable to secure a divorce from Fitzpiers, Grace reaches an accommodating agreement on her own terms. In her journey she has been alternately on the receiving end of a controlling parent, an abusive husband and the adoring Winterbourne who effectively sacrifices his life for her.

      During her emotional development, Grace, I believe, finds physical and emotional comfort with her rival, Felice Charmond, in an unusual encounter which hints at a higher form of human affection than the 'conventional' heterosexual trysts elsewhere (notably Fitzpiers' seduction of the buxom Suke Damson). As they take shelter from the threatening forest, Grace is en-wrapped in the arms of one who needs her and trusts her implicitly. Does Hardy show Grace gaining more emotional fulfillment with those of her own sex? The possibilities are couched in the literary mores of the day but tantalisingly glimpsed all the same. This is a book which I believe challenges sexual conventions - where Hardy shows the hidden depths and complexities of human sexuality; where easy sexual labels are replaced by the 'sublimity...loftier quality of abstract humanism.'

      I don't think Grace elicits the reader's sympathy in the way that Sue Bridehead does. The link between the two is the burgeoning conflict between their social status, their acquired education and the messy business of human sexuality. Grace certainly doesn't exude sex appeal and Giles, to his tragic cost, remains in love with the ideal of her girlhood. He cannot love this newly discovered flesh and blood although a forlorn encounter between the two sees him awaken to her sexually in a brief gesture that strikes against her recently gained superiority.

      Grace, I feel, isn't even a very likable character but there is something tough and ineluctably modern in the woman she becomes - the de-fanging of her menfolk in different ways - the overbearing father cast adrift, the errant husband brought to heel and the romantic lover of her youth consigned to the grave. Underneath the coy exterior is a complex human being whom Hardy lets us glimpse but who cannot be boxed in any certainties.
    • 3/5
      Not my favourite of the Hardy's but still well worth a read if you enjoy the English countryside and those that reside there.
    • 3/5
      I found “The Woodlanders” good in parts but a little disappointing on the whole. As it’s Thomas Hardy, I would like to give it a second read some time.
    • 4/5
      This Hardy novel tells the story of Grace, whose father has worked hard to educate her about what is typical for their class so that she may have improved opportunities in life. She does indeed marry well in theory as a result, but the moral of the story without giving the plot away is that moving upwards doesn't necessarily equal happiness.

      As always, a terrific web of storytelling from Hardy. Although supposedly his personal favourite of all his novels, I preferred Tess and The Mayor of Casterbridge, but it was a great read nonetheless.

      3.5 stars - probably quite a harsh rating, but I'm comparing this book with Hardy's other work rather than on a par with other novels.
    • 2/5
      A rare failure to finish the book here.
      The introduction by Patricia Ingham reveals most of the plot, and as the plot has that common Victorian failing of being more than a little contrived, I struggled with the text. I have enjoyed Hardy in the past, and I expect to go back to this book some time in the future - when my memories of the details in the intro have fade. :)
      100 pages read March 2015
    • 3/5
      “He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”

      Unlike some of Hardy's other heroines Grace Melbury is not some exotic piece of womanhood who clashes against her neighbours and family instead she is rather unremarkable, ordinary and quite shallow.Instead she becomes a symbol of the social differences between the rural inhabitants of Wessex gleaning a livelihood from the New Forest and the burgeoning educated middle classes. She is the daughter of a locally well respected timber merchant who is sent away to school but was never really accepted there due to he lowly upbringing however on her return home she finds that she is also dissatisfied with her role within her home community. Thus she becomes torn between the educated but fickle doctor Edred Fitzpiers and her childhood sweetheart,the kind hearted and thoroughly respectable Giles Winterborne. Encouraged by her father she takes the ill-judged decision to marry Edred Fitzpiers with tragic consequences for Giles Winterborne in particular.

      The simple life of these country folk and their surroundings is beautifully written in typical Hardy style whilst the author deliberately avoids a happy twee ending. The minor characters are particularly well written. There is also certainly touches of rather humorous pathos and irony as well as a dig at the legal system of the time with its strict adherence to both social and religious norms. However,for me Hardy is in many respects just too subtle here and whilst the idea is sound I personally feel that he did not enlarge on these points enough.

      Lovers of good period literature will enjoy this but it not the most enjoyable of his works that I've read.
    • 4/5
      The third book by Thomas Hardy for me. I like his writing. This one is set in the Woodlands and involves people who make money from the timber industry. Giles has been led to believe that he and Grace will be husband and wife but Grace’s father backs out and convinces himself that his daughter needs to marry up and not beneath herself. Grace has been educated in boarding schools. This story is very much like a modern day soap opera. Grace marries the doctor, the doctor is unfaithful. Grace wants a divorce but is denied it. The doctor returns to her, she rejects him but he doesn’t give up. This book doesn’t have the same amount of tragedy found in his other books but still it is enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      It took three attempts to get into this novel (after loving the film version), but using Libravox as a "book on tape" worked. I thoroughly enjoyed this story of love gone wrong several times over this time around.
    • 5/5
      On the surface this could be categorized as one of those Victorian 'marriage plot' novels. A woman is pursued by 2 men, someone with social status but little moral character and someone who is lower class but has all the qualities of a hero. But this book deals with so much more. It touches on the issues of class, women's role in society, social rules like extra-marital sex and ostracism when those social rules are broken. And Hardy deals with these issues so well. There are all of those pivotal points where people can choose their path in life and you know that one decision will have repercussions that will determine their future and the future of so many other people. Always tragic and always a pleasure to read. This is probably one of my favorite Hardy novels.
    • 4/5
      This is the 4th Thomas Hardy book I've read. Interestingly I love them while I'm reading them but in less than a month I can barely remember the plots. They always deal with the picturesque beautiful countryside and simple folk's ways being upturned by the big bad city people creeping into their town.
      In The Woodlanders, Grace's father decides to educate her, but then she is too good for everyone around her so she marries Giles, the city doctor who is working in their village. Everything falls apart and Grace and her father both regret her education and the loss of their idyllic life. Same theme as the other Hardy books I've read.
    • 4/5
      I've read this Hardy novel several times. I don't seem to tire of Giles' pathetic and heroic devotion.
    • 4/5
      This was a fairly typical Hardy novel: misplaced affections, broken hearts, overindulgent parents, class divisions, long lost lovers reunited, hints of scandal, etc. There's a bit of Gabriel Oak in Giles Winterborne (and, for that matter, a bit of Bathsheba Everdene in Grace Melbury). Still, I enjoyed the novel, which I listened to on audio, read by the wonderful Samuel West. The secondary female characters--particularly the spunky and loyal Marty South, but also Felice Charmond and Suke Damson--give the novel an added charm, but the conflicted, rather immature, manipulating and rather easily manipulated Grace Melbury really just needed a good smack.
    • 4/5
      This book has been sitting, unread, on my shelf for over fifteen years. The reason? My unutterable loathing for Tess of the D’Urvervilles. Jude the Obscure is in my top five list of classics, my top ten list of favourite books of any genre. So why the reluctance to try another? Because I hated Tess just. That. Much.

      My resolution to read more missed classics this year saw me scouring my shelves for unread possibilities. I pretended not to see The Woodlanders sitting there on the first two passes, but on the third I mustered my courage and, having stared it down for a few minutes, addressed fifteen years of neglect.

      Grace Melbury is young, educated beyond her class, beautiful; her father is now unsure of the suitability of her intended, Giles Winterborne, despite his earlier bias towards the man. Grace is influenced, perhaps too much, by her father’s views, and further swayed by the attention of the handsome doctor recently come to the area. What follows is a more rewarding look at one of Hardy’s favourite themes, this passive reaction to coincidence and fate that one might call ‘doom’, than is suggested by similarities to Tess.

      As with all Hardy, it’s worth wading into anything for the rural atmosphere and description alone, but I was relieved to find an engaging story with characters who, while –with the noticeable exception of Giles Winterborne – are not overly imbued with strength of character, are at least shown to think, if not always act, for themselves.

      It is a tragedy, yes, but it is also moving in other ways... and Hardy is cruel to his characters, but it is only by exposing real hardships of health, societal expectations, indifference from a church-drugged legal system; for all that, there is a hopeful renewal that is left to the reader to cheer or deplore at the end, and the tale is seeped in Hardy’s love of nature... where Tess’s fate made me grit my teeth that it had not descended a hundred pages sooner, the lives of the residents of Little Hintock inspired pity, hope and interest, to the very end.
    • 4/5
      I love Thomas Hardy's writing. His descriptive prose is great, and he creates characters whom one loves to love and loves to hate. The experience of reading this particular book was a little bit like watching a tennis match with the plot moving back and forth repeatedly. I always have a bit of difficulty with the sexism, but I try to remember the time period in which the book was written. One of the heroines in this story is repeatedly manipulated by her father, until finally, near the end she takes a costly stand for herself. All-in-all, a wonderful read!
    • 4/5
      The Woodlanders is only the third Thomas Hardy novel I have read, the preceeding two being Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess. I am also aware of the story of the Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure thanks to television and radio adaptations. Whilst I would probably say that I enjoying the Madding Crowd more, The Woodlanders is the next most satisfying of the Hardy novels that I have come into contact with thus far. I certainly preferred it to the incredibly bleak world of Tess. Not that anyone should expect The Woodlanders to be a laugh a minute, it is a Hardy novel after all, and he is a writer whose characters seem almost guaranteed to suffer.

      At first I found this novel quite difficult. Having mostly been reading fairly contemporary books recently, it was quite tough getting reaccustomed with the sort of lengthy, ponderous sentences that are such a typical feature of nineteenth century writing. The pace is quite slow at first too, and whilst it never turns in to a rapid thriller, the dramatic tension does increase considerably in the final of the three volumes.

      Hardy excels at depicting both the highs and lows of rural life in his time. As in the Madding Crowd, the more humble characters display the greatest ability to live moral lives, whereas their neighbours from slightly higher up the social ladder are more prone to go astray. My favourite character was the fairly marginal figure of Marty South, the pure and stoical young woman who cherishes an unrequited admiration for Giles Winterbourne, a simple man of modest means. I did not really warm to the other principle characters, the well-educated local beauty Grace Melbury, her father, and the doctor Fitzpiers, though I was nevertheless interested to see what fate Hardy had in store for them all.

      Students of literature will enjoy decoding the allegorical references and observing how Hardy anticipates features of twentieth century novels. Students of both literature and social history will share amusement at the incredibly tame references to marriage and relationships that could only be added in later revisions.
    • 4/5
      One of Hardy's wonderfully evocative tales of a lost world. the characters live in an isolated community in the forest, where superstition and respectability rule their lives. The main story is about people destroyed by the law of the times which prevented divorce even when a guilty party had abandoned and mistreated his wife. This is all set in haunting, dark and primitive woodland. At the end the hero dies and almost merges into the landscape. Tragic and passionate!
    • 5/5
      This is the first Hardy I've read since an abortive attempt at reading an abridged version of "Far From the Madding Crowd" at school - at the time received by the entire class with unmitigated grumbling. I was therefore not expecting much of this but felt I owed it to myself to read at least one of his novels as an adult.

      In truth I've been very pleasantly surprised - so much so that I've already picked up a couple of his other novels for future reading.

      It seems unfortunate that Hardy was driven to give up writing novels following concerted criticism of the perceived pessimism and "immorality" of his work. It's difficult to see how a perceptive writer could be anything other than pessismistic when faced with the reality that life was hard and uncertain for almost all of the poor of 19th century England.

      While much has been written about the horrors of the industrial cities for the urban poor, much less has been said or written about life for the rural poor. It's important to remember that the decades during which Hardy was writing his novels were dominated by one of the worst agricultural depressions England has ever seen. Stretching from around 1870 to the end of the century, it saw a huge rise in unemployment in rural areas, driving off the land a generation whose parents had managed to hang on in the face of earlier waves of migration to the cities during rapid industrialisation or despite the attractions of emigration. For those who remained, agricultural wages, never high at the best of times, fell to near-starvation levels, and destitution and the workhouse or emigration became the only options for many.

      The Victorians, as we do today, tended to romanticise rural life. Most artists depicted happy and well-fed peasants, scenic cottages and the supposed continuing pleasures of Merrie England in images intended to brighten up the homes of the rising and prosperous middle class and edify their children. The reality for many was, however, captured by a smaller number of artists who depicted groups of the ragged and destitute resting by the sides of roads, being turned away from rural workhouses or attempting to beg food at the doors of cottages which were themselves little more than crumbling hovels; or small children shivering under scant shelters while employed as bird-scarers in the winter fields. For the rest it was a life of long hours of gruelling physical work, mostly outdoor in all weathers, of uncertain and insecure employment. This reality was one the middle classes were not to be enlightened or reminded about in case they found it distressing.

      "Immorality", too, was not lacking in Victorian England. According to social historians the incidence of illegitimate births ranged from 5% to 15% or thereabouts depending on when and where the figures are drawn from, and almost anyone who has investigated their own family history will have discovered rather more illegitimacy than they might have expected.

      The problem, I imagine, lies with the expectations, values and judgements of the largely urban and surburban middle class reviewers and critics of Hardy's novels. At what precisely, though, were they taking umbridge? At the educated and well-born Fitzpiers's all too easy seduction of the all too willing village girl Suke Damson, who presumably fancied a bit of not-so-rough for a change? At his willingness to take advantage of the power imbalance between them or at her naive imagining that she might get more than a few quick fumbles out of it? At his adulterous relationship with the young widow Mrs Charmond? Or at her admission that she has flirted with and encouraged her many lovers and admirers - or indeed at her eventual sexual surrender to Fitzpiers? Or was it all of these?

      Whatever it was, it was clearly too much for the critics and the result was a loss to English fiction if it was a gain for English poetry.
    • 3/5
      Though not as good as Hardy's better-known novels, it's definitely not his worst. The end could have been better.
    • 5/5
      Thomas Hardy was an architect by profession and his eye is sensitive to the historic environment engulfing his protagonists. His awareness of time and space and the vast tapestry that humans strut there stuff on, is second to none apart from perhaps ahem.... Mr Shakespeare himself. It is a story of the macrocosm of human passion set against the microcosm of village life. I keep coming back to this one over and over again. To be read slowly on a winters eve next to a hot pot of tea, crumpets, slippers and a roaring fire....