The Woodlanders

"The Woodlanders is an important one, and the characters are so key. We have Grace Melbury, whose father adores her and wants to secure her a good marriage. Grace gets together with a doctor. I won’t ruin it for all your wonderful readers, but she is left lonely and isolated. And there is Giles, who she grew up with and who she really loves. But Giles is a very rustic character; he’s not as educated as her. Of course, she should have chosen Giles because they are so well suited. There’s an education and class barrier there, which appears in Hardy’s writing always. That comes across very much in Jude the Obscure , which is about Hardy wanting to get to ‘Christminster’—Oxford—which of course he never did. Hardy, more or less, taught himself everything. We saw this with Bathsheba and Gabriel Oak. She wouldn’t look twice at him, because he was a rustic character. She thought he wasn’t good enough for her, to begin with. And the same with Grace and Giles in The Woodlanders . Here, the context is the coming of the divorce laws, and Grace must navigate that process with the support of her father. But what’s loveliest about The Woodlanders is, again, the description of the landscape, the woods, the heath. So it’s a great read, and I think still very relevant today. Because his writing is all about human relationships, the human condition. And that’s what draws people to Hardy. Also the characterisation, all those interrelationships and connections that we see in Hardy’s narratives."