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  ’  

THE WOODLANDERS

T H was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on

 June ; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he
was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an
architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publication
of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (), he determined to
make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an
architect had led to his meeting at St Juliot in Cornwall Emma
Gifford, who became his first wife in .
In the s Hardy had written a substantial amount of
unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his
creative effort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure,
the last-written of his novels, came out in , closing a sequence
of fiction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (), The
Return of the Native (), Two on a Tower (), The Mayor
of Casterbridge (), The Woodlanders (), and Tess of the
d’Urbervilles ().
Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly
express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in
his collected verse (almost all published after ) possess great
individuality and power.
In  Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in  Emma
died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas
Hardy died in January ; the work he left behind––the novels,
the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynasts––forms one of the
supreme achievements in English imaginative literature.
D K is Professor of English Emeritus at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Courtesy Professor of
English at the University of Oregon. He is the editor of The Cam-
bridge Companion to Thomas Hardy () as well as two collections
of essays on Hardy, and he has edited The Mayor of Casterbridge for
Oxford World’s Classics.
P B holds the Jury Chair of English Language and
Literature at the University of Adelaide, where she is also Deputy
Vice-Chancellor. She has published widely on nineteenth-century
fiction and feminist criticism. Her work on Hardy includes Thomas
Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, first
published in , essays on many of the major novels, and the
Macmillan New Casebook on Jude the Obscure ().
  ’  
For over  years Oxford World’s Classics have brought
readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 
titles––from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the
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The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained

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changing needs of readers.
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

THOMAS HARDY

The Woodlanders
Edited with Notes by
DALE KRAMER

With a new Introduction by

PENNY BOUMELHA

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Dale Kramer 1985, 1996, 2005
Chronology © Patricia Ingham 2002
Introduction and Select Bibliography © Penny Boumelha 2005
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1981 by the Clarendon Press
First issued as a World’s Classics paperback 1985
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2000
New edition 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928.
The woodlanders.
(Oxford World’s classics)
Bibliography: p.
I. Kramer, Dale, 1936– –. II. Title.
PR4750.W7 1985 823′.8 84–25422
ISBN 0–19–284068–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc
 CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface vii

Map of Hardy’s Wessex viii
Map of Locations in The Woodlanders x
Introduction xi
Locations in Wessex and Dorset xxvii
Note on the Text xxix
Select Bibliography xxxviii
A Chronology of Thomas Hardy xlii

THE WOODLANDERS 

Textual Notes 

Explanatory Notes 
This page intentionally left blank
 GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

T first concern in the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Hardy’s

works has been with the texts. Individual editors have compared
every version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised,
and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation, and styling
in each of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to exclude
much that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. In
some cases this is the first time that the novel has appeared in
a critical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possible
Hardy’s manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what his
compositors thought he should have written.
Some account of the editors’ discoveries will be found in the Note
on the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisions
their work has revealed are given in the Textual Notes. In some cases
a Clarendon Press edition of the novel provides a wealth of further
material for the reader interested in the way Hardy’s writing
developed from manuscript to final collected edition.
I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing the
maps that accompany each volume.

S G
 INTRODUCTION

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to
treat the Introduction as an Afterword

The Woodlanders was first published in . In some respects, it

marked a return to the settings and plots of Hardy’s earlier fiction.
‘A woodland story’ had been the novel he originally intended to
write as a successor to Far from the Madding Crowd, in , but he
laid the project aside for some years and instead tried his hand at a
broader range of styles and genres. In October , the editor of
Macmillan’s Magazine, John Morley, approached Hardy for a new
serial. After some consideration, he decided that the time had now
come for the ‘woodland story’, which he returned to in late . As
a professional writer, Hardy was always careful about the business of
authorship, and he negotiated with a number of American magazines
for the sale of American sale rights. Thus, the novel first appeared
in serial form in Macmillan’s Magazine and in Harper’s Bazar in
. The first edition, in the then usual three-volume format, was
published on  March of the same year.
By the mid-s, Thomas Hardy was a well-established and
popular novelist. Despite occasional skirmishes with editorial cen-
sorship over the inclusion of material supposedly ‘unsuitable’ for the
young female reader, he had always been able to publish his novels in
the most conventional and lucrative of fashions: in serial form in
general periodicals, and then in volume form through reputable
publishing houses. But it was with his late novels––from The Wood-
landers () on––that he became also a controversial writer. These
attracted critical opprobrium for the overtness with which they focus
on sexual relationships, for their interrogation of conventional
understandings of chastity and marriage, for the absence of explicit
moral justice in their denouements, and for their failure to abide by
the prevailing canons of good taste in plot and tone. Hardy was by no
means the only target of such normative, morality-based objections
at this period, for the s and s saw a great flowering of public
debate over marriage and divorce, sex roles, sexual morality, and
prostitution. Such debates took place in the press and in Parliament,
xii Introduction
in the law courts and the medical establishment––and, of course, they
also found their way into literature. His later works were published
at a time when English culture abounded with ‘problem’ plays, New
Woman novels, ‘Decadent’ fiction, and the ‘dangerous’ European
influences of French Naturalism and Scandinavian ‘ibsenity’.1
In this context, though Hardy was not particularly a pioneer, the
very popularity of his writing seems to have increased the perceived
affront. Despite his resolutely oblique and limited engagement with
public polemic on such issues, he was soon depicted as a willing
conscript in the so-called ‘Anti-Marriage League’ of moral sceptics
and social critics identified in the s by crusading conservatives.
While The Woodlanders perhaps does not match the challenge to
what are now called family values embodied in, say, the double
sexual ‘fall’ of Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the
confrontational subtitle of that novel––A Pure Woman––it certainly
offers its own and perfectly explicit undermining of conventional
moralities. For example, the conversation between Grace and her
rival Felice Charmond, lost in the woods, ends with the culminating
recognition ‘ “O my great God! . . . He’s had you!” ’ (p. ); Grace
greets the anxious women who have come to enquire after news of
Fitzpiers’s accident has spread with the words, ‘Indeed, you have a
perfect right to go into his bedroom. . . . Wives all, let’s enter
together!’ (p. ); and, just as startlingly for some, Grace finds it
remarkably easy to contemplate the transfer of her own affections:
‘Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been cast
aside by Edred Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating chival-
rous and undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready to
her hand’ (p. ). The anti-marriage theme is an issue which Hardy
takes on directly, but with characteristic irony, right at the outset of
the Preface which he wrote for the  edition of The Woodlanders:
In the present novel, as in one or two others of this series which involve
the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle––given the
man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation––is left
where it stood; and it is tacitly assumed for the purposes of the story
that no doubt of the depravity of the erratic heart who feels some
second person to be better suited to his or her tastes than the one with
1
For an extended discussion of Hardy’s later novels in this context, see Penny
Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton:
Harvester Press; New York: St Martin’s Press, ).
 Introduction xiii
whom he has contracted to live, enters the head of reader or writer for a
moment (p. ).

Despite the rather disingenuous disavowal of any moral argument in

the book, in this passage Hardy nevertheless stresses for his readers
the centrality of ‘matrimonial divergence’, ‘sexual relation’, and ‘the
erratic heart’ to this novel.
In this respect, The Woodlanders is only giving a new inflection to
an abiding characteristic of his fiction. At the heart of most of his
novels lies a story of love, courtship, and marriage. The novels take
their shape and narrative energy from marital choice, as the vehicle
and confirmation of what might be called the moral and sentimental
education of their marriageable protagonist. This plot is, of course, a
staple of the English novel, and this outline could as easily represent
Jane Austen as Thomas Hardy. But one of the distinctive elements of
Hardy’s version of this structuring fable is his insistence that the plot
of what might be seen as the private life (love and personal relation-
ship) is in fact the meeting point of a set of inherently, even intransi-
gently, social discourses. So, sexual and marital choices are made
among a range of potential partners whose difference from one
another embodies a set of broader social affiliations and allegiances
amongst which the protagonist must also select. Almost invariably in
Hardy, this entails issues of class position, as is particularly evident
in The Woodlanders from Melbury’s hesitations between Giles
Winterborne and Edred Fitzpiers as the husband who will either
waste or enhance the value of the educational investment he has
made in his treasured daughter, Grace. It is striking that the waver-
ing and the choice itself are depicted as much through Melbury as
through Grace. Hardy is always alert to the gender differential in the
marriage plot which means that the choice of a marital partner is far
more determining for the status of a middle-class woman (neither
labourer nor independently wealthy) than for that of a man. ‘A
woman takes her colour from the man she’s walking with,’ Melbury
remarks of Grace (p. ); by contrast, Felice Charmond comments
of Fitzpiers that ‘It is of rather more importance to know what the
man is himself than what his family is’ (p. ). If the potential class
mobility belongs to Grace, the social ambition is almost entirely
Melbury’s, and there is genuine poignancy in his determination that
Grace’s education will lead to a marriage whose success, he hopes,
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