A STORY OF LOVE IN A NATURAL SETTING

The Woodlanders does not completely abandon the mythical and ‘cosmic’ elements that we found to be so important in The Mayor of Casterbridge but it does show Hardy in retreat from his ‘ambitious’ position (the position in which Eustacia Vye is a goddess and Henchard is King Lear). In The Woodlanders the other side of Hardy predominates, the side of him that weaves together so brilliantly a story of love with the parallel movements of the rustic setting in which that story takes place. None of Hardy's major novels is purely one or the other of these things. As we saw, even in The Mayor of Casterbridge there are strong natural elements, and that novel is in part a love story; conversely, even Far from the Madding Crowd makes some attempt on the cosmic and universal.

Hardy's interest in The Woodlanders, which was, incidentally, his favourite novel, centres once again on love and once again on the havoc that love creates in its capriciousness. Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber merchant in remote Little Hintock, is, as we can expect from what we have learnt of father–daughter relationships in The Mayor of Casterbridge, much beloved by her father. He has virtually promised her hand to a worthy woodlander, Giles Winterborne, but when she returns from boarding-school, educated and refined, her father aspires to a greater match for her.