The Woodlanders Reading Order

The Woodlanders (1887) by Thomas Hardy is the Hardy novel that Hardy himself considered his finest — a tragedy of thwarted love and social incompatibility set in the woodland village of Little Hintock (based on the area around Melbury Osmund in Dorset), where the forester Giles Winterborne and the farmer's daughter Grace Melbury cannot marry because Grace's education has elevated her beyond her origins, and where the charming surgeon Edred Fitzpiers introduces into the enclosed woodland community a sexual sophistication and social ambition that destroys several lives. The novel is quieter than Hardy's more celebrated tragedies — neither as Gothic as Tess nor as savage as Jude — but its treatment of the class and education themes that run through Hardy's fiction is arguably more nuanced, and its woodland setting (the novel's actual protagonist, some critics argue) gives it an atmospheric density that the later novels lack.