The Woodlanders

Reading time: about 10 h
Length: 135,886 words · 258 pages
Structure: 48 chapters
Language: English
Era: Victorian

Grace Melbury returns from finishing school to the Wessex woods, torn between her old rustic sweetheart Giles Winterborne and the sophisticated Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, whom she marries — a mismatch that soon reveals Fitzpiers's infidelity with the local femme fatale Mrs. Charmond.

Hardy serialized the novel in Macmillan's Magazine through 1886-87 before its book publication in 1887; he considered it, in some ways, his favorite of his own novels.

Bibliomancer restores the 1887 text exactly as Hardy wrote it.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Thomas Hardy

1840–1928 · Victorian

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born near Dorchester, trained as an architect, and turned to fiction in his thirties. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are set in the “Wessex” he mapped onto the south-west of England. After the reception of Jude he wrote no more novels and devoted his last thirty years to poetry, publishing eight volumes and the verse drama The Dynasts.

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