The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy, 1887)

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"
• 134-5 some pretty freely represented casual sex between Suke and Fitzpiers
• 142 parental pressure on Grace to accept fitzpiers
• 149 "retrospective criticism" of Grace's origins if Fitzpiers purchases a practice in another towb
• what would a contemporary audience have made of Fitzpiers' irreverent view of marriage? Would they have felt unsettled as Grace does on the next page?

Theme Tracking

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