The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy, 1887)
From Commonplace Book
Contents
General Notes
- it seems like we come sideways into the main narrative: the central individuals are less important than community and landscape
- 5 pastoral solitude contrasted with communal awareness
- 14 "lifehold" lease on property - perhaps a lower class version of the life interest in property of the wealthy?
- 70ff Winterbourne's Christmas party - the way class difference is externally set in the yeoman farmer class, Grace had to go away to make itreally apprent
- 115 the frisson of Grace and Fitzpiers' first encounter
- 120 Grace is socially beneath Fitzpiers
- 123 "The secret of happiness lay in limiting the aspirations"
Theme Tracking
Reading and Writing
Materiality
Shakespeare references
- 10 "The palm [Marty's] was red and blistering, as if her present occupation were as yet too recent to have subdued it to what it worked in." Sonnet 111, "the dyer's hand"
- 26!"...a soul's specific gravity constantly reasserts itself as less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown." About Melbury - Hamlet "to be" soliloquy, as the note suggests a very specific, labored yoking of literary imagery to scientific language about relative density
