The Woodlanders
In a hamlet buried in the woods, a timber merchant's daughter comes home from an expensive education that fits her for nobody there, including the cider-maker she has been promised to since childhood. He loses his cottages when the last life on the lease falls in, and she is married instead to a restless young doctor who reads philosophy and has no intention of staying faithful to a woodlander's daughter. Hardy named it late in life as his own favourite among his books; its trees are observed as closely as its people, and the marriage law of the 1880s is on trial throughout.
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Lineage
- companion to ↑ Far from the Madding Crowd
Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 56% · 12 shared
- 56% · 12 shared
- 52% · 14 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 49% · 12 shared
- 49% · 12 shared