The concept provides occasion for some of his most strikingly expressive episodes and vignettes, showing man and nature symbiotically linked. Hardys curious title,The Woodlanders, seems to define his human characters as fellow inhabitants with the trees. Their lives become as entangled and mutually destructive as those of the surrounding plant life, among which the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. Fitzpiers has quixotically elected to set up a practice in this remote woodland village.
Felice Charmond, a cosmopolitan beauty, lives a solitary life at Hintock House, and Dr.
Grace Melbury has grown up in that environment, but has since been to private school and stayed on for a time as a governess. Giles Winterbourne and Marty South are the only true woodlanders, natives of the region, who actually work with trees. In his Preface, however, the author chooses to put the emphasis on matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation The lovers he writes of are mismatched and at cross-purposes not surprisingly, since they are an oddly mixed group. The relationship between man and trees is a recurrent theme in Hardys work: variations on it appear in such poems as The Ivy-Wife, Logs on the Hearth and In a Wood. InThe Woodlandersit is as though oppressive verticality can have a comparable effect. InThe Return of the NativeClym Yeobright is troubled by the oppressive horizontality of the landscape. Their lives and their various struggles are tacitly inter-connected with those of the trees in whose shadow they pass their days. Once again Hardy created a striking and defining context: his characters live, and in many cases work, in a remote area of woodland, centred on Little Hintock. Macmillan published a three-volume version in March 1887. It was serialised in monthly instalments inMacmillans Magazine, running from May 1886 to April 1887.
He completedThe Woodlandersin February 1887. Not for another ten years, however, was this conception developed into a novel. According to theLifeHardy had the idea for a woodland story as early as 1875.
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