The Woodlanders

The Woodlanders is a novel by the English writer Thomas Hardy, serialised in Macmillan's Magazine from May 1886 to April 1887 and published in three volumes in 1887. It is one of his Wessex novels.

The story takes place in the woodland village of Little Hintock, where nearly everyone depends on the trees for a living. Grace Melbury has been sent away to school by her father, a timber merchant with ambitions for her, and she comes back engaged in nothing but expectation: Giles Winterborne, the woodsman she had been informally promised to, is no longer good enough for her, and her father steers her instead towards a doctor named Fitzpiers who has moved into the neighbourhood. Hardy follows what each of the four people does to the others over the following years, with the wood itself, its felling and its planting, carrying the rhythm of the book.

Hardy wrote about the rural Dorset he grew up in and watched the coming of the railways and the markets change it, and this novel is often read as the one in which his woodsmen and their trade are most closely observed.