Rating: 
Summary: Disaster at the altar in the church of Hardy.
Review: "It would have made a beautiful story," Thomas Hardy said about this novel, "if I could have carried out my idea of it; but somehow I come so far short of my intention."
"I wish you had never thought of educating me," Thomas Hardy's protagonist tells her father at one point in this novel, "because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles" (pp. 232-33). Hardy (1840-1928) wrote his eleventh novel in 1887, before his better-known masterpieces, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) and JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895), and a year after THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (1886). Set in the "partly real and partly dream country" of Hardy's Wessex, in the "sequestered" forest community of Little Hintock (located "outside the gates of the world," p. 6), a place where "loneliness is not so very lonely after a while" (p. 83), THE WOODLANDERS is about doomed love, betrayal, and social restraints, and like the Hardy's other work, it succeeds as a satisfying story of a romantic disaster in Hardy's cruel universe. The novel tells the sad tale of a woman, Grace Melbury, forced to choose marriage between two suitors of different social statures, Giles Winterborne, a local woodlander with a gentle, virtuous nature, and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious doctor and a scoundrel. Influenced by her well-intentioned though meddling father, Mr. Melbury, who only wants his daughter to "marry well" (p. 89), Grace's decision ultimately leads to disastrous consequences and, in the end, to a lonely woman worshipping at a dead man's grave. Once again, we discover the course of love is never happy in Hardy's universe.
Rather gloomy for a Victorian romance novel? Well, yes. But reading Victorian fiction does not get any better than reading Thomas Hardy's extraordinary novels. Returning to Hardy's brooding, melancholy fiction after my first encounter with his novels more than twenty five years ago, I am re-discovering Hardy's brilliant ability to convey familiar, primordial truths through his fiction, making him worth reading again and again.
G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Overlooked classic would be good for a book group
Review: Discovered I had a copy of this in my library from I don't know how long ago, and read it this week. This overlooked Hardy (not one of the hackneyed school list titles) would be a good choice for a book group. Unusual plot covering 3 social classes and their interconnections reminded me of Middlemarch, as well as the theme of rural England being slowly industrialized. I always forget how blatant and "modern" Hardy can be in his discussion of sexuality, as well. Well worth your time if you've forgotten how good Hardy can be.
Rating: 
Summary: Hardy gone berserk
Review: Hardy classified THE WOODLANDERS with his Novels of Character and Ingenuity, which category included his very best novels (TESS, THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE). This 1887 novel is so bizarre, however, that you might feel it belongs more properly with his Romances and Fantasies. In the secluded rustic community of Little Hintock all manner of things are a-brewing: simple Marty South has a thing for cider-merchant Giles Winterbourne, who has been promised for years to marry well-educated Grace Melbury, but Grace's father marries her off instead to philandering Edred Fitzpiers, who has a thing for local wealthy widow Felice Charmond. In this circle of desire all manner of things can go wrong--and, this being Hardy, of course they do. Some of his wildest plot contrivances (including two bizarre scenes wherein the Widow Charmond must convey crucial information to Grace, and Fitzpiers even more crucial information to Grace's father) occur without the redeeming Shakespearean scope of a novel like THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE which allows you to overlook the wackiness. Still, even if this is lesser Hardy, it's still Hardy, so the novel has such poetically gorgeous evocations of landscape and character as to make everything worthwhile in the end.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly the best ever book about nature.
Review: 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'.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly the best ever book about nature.
Review: 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'.
Rating:
Summary: Not My Favorite, but Still Awesome Literature
Review: I'm a big fan of Thomas Hardy, but of all of the books he has written, this one was probably my least favorite. Hardy's mastery of the English language is always entertaining, and he tells his usual intriguing romance coupled with social commentary, but I thought the ending was "too happy!" Apparently, this was Hardy's own favorite novel. Woodlanders is definately worthwhile, but I would recommend to novice Hardy readers to try Tess, Jude or Mayor of Casterbridge before this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Not My Favorite, but Still Awesome Literature
Review: I'm a big fan of Thomas Hardy, but of all of the books he has written, this one was probably my least favorite. Hardy's mastery of the English language is always entertaining, and he tells his usual intriguing romance coupled with social commentary, but I thought the ending was "too happy!" Apparently, this was Hardy's own favorite novel. Woodlanders is definately worthwhile, but I would recommend to novice Hardy readers to try Tess, Jude or Mayor of Casterbridge before this novel.
Rating:
Summary: A pure joy to read The Woodlanders!
Review: It took me a few pages to see that every sentence had a meaning that was unique and special. Hardy's understanding of the human condition and the human comedy is so impressive. After reading The Woodlanders, I yearn to visit the places that he described. Where is Stoy Hill? I would like to know as I am going to England soon for a long holiday. I am almost finished with the book and I am lingering because I am getting to the end and I don't want to finish! Hardy is a pure genius!
Rating:
Summary: A lesser known gem of English literature
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A lesser known gem of English literature
Review: 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.
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