The Woodlanders

In the wooded village of Little Hintock, Grace Melbury, the daughter of a timber merchant, comes home from an expensive education and finds that she no longer fits in. She has long been promised to Giles Winterborne, a loyal, simple apple-grower and woodsman, but her father, ambitious for her, pushes her into marriage with the handsome and unfaithful young doctor Edred Fitzpiers. Meanwhile Marty South, a poor girl who loves Giles in silence, sells her beautiful hair to the rich Mrs Charmond.

Published in 1887, The Woodlanders was, Thomas Hardy said, in some respects his favourite among his novels as a story. Its picture of the woods, the cider-making and the old ways of the countryside is among his most beautiful, and it questions class and the trap of an unhappy marriage. From here, try The Mayor of Casterbridge; for Hardy himself, see his life.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.

After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.