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?
• 151 F has been having it off with Suke
• 171 Felice: "Women are always carried about like corks upon the waves of masculine desires."
• 176 clematis -- "old man's beard" -- Edward Thomas
• 180 the fatality of Charmond not renewing Giles's lease contributing to the later frustration of her desire for Fitzpiers - class and property conspiring against desire
• 183 the nature of Grave's feelings for Fitzpiers

Grace was amazed at the mildness of the anger which  the suspicion engendered in her: she was but little excited, and her jealousy was languid even to death.

• 185: Wouvermans https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philips_Wouwerman_-_A_View_on_a_Seashore_with_Fishwives_offering_Fish_to_a_Horseman_(1650s).jpg
• 186: Emotional honesty tied up with nature for Grace - remarkable passage

Nature was bountiful, she thought. No sooner had she been cast aside by Edred Fitzpiers than another being, impersonating chivalrous and undiluted manliness, had arisen out of the earth, ready for her hand. [...] Her abandonment to the seductive hour and scene after her sense of ill-usage, her revolt for the nonce against social law, her passionate desire for primitive life, may have shown in her face. Winterbourne was looking at her, his eyes lingering on the flower that she wore in her bosom. Almost with the abstraction of a somnambulist he stretched out with his hand and gently caressed the flower.

• 188:

As her husband's character thus shaped itself under the touch of time Grace was almost startled to find how little she suffered from that jealous excitement which is conventionally attributed to all wives in such circumstances. But though possessed by none of the feline wildness which it was her moral duty to experience, she did not fail to suspect that she had made a frightful mistake in her marriage.

• 201 "Cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles": I keep feeling echoes of Grace in Maggie in Mill, here especially in their passive self-abnegation, and in Mr Melbury and Mr Tulliver's well-intentioned busybody actions esp. pertaining to education and its value
• 215-6 Grace's sympathy with Charmond

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
• 191 Old Timothy says "all's well that ends well" when they find Fitz asleep in the stable
• 198 quotes Hamlet comparing Winterbourne to Horatio, who "as one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing"