The Woodlanders contains some of Thomas Hardy's finest writing. Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of Little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous, and in a moving tale that has vibrant characters, many humorous moments and genuine pathos coupled with tragic irony, Hardy eschews a happy ending. With characteristic derision, he exposes the cruel indifference of the archaic legal system of his day, and shows the tragic consequences of untimely adherence to futile social and religious proprieties.

The writer of an introductory essay, conscious of the need to be brief, may well be tempted to offer an authoritative account of the text in question. In the case of The Woodlanders, this is a temptation best avoided. In summary, it might seem to be the quintessential Hardy novel. Its subject, described in the Preface as 'the question of matrimonial divergence', takes us into the familiar fraught territory of Hardy's fiction: love and sexuality, the clash of private feeling and public institutions, and the ever-present sense of class and social boundaries. The two main strands of the plot, one exploring the dilemma of Grace Melbury as she finds herself loved by two men, the other tracing the impact of two metropolitan outsiders, Edred Fitzpiers and Felice Charmond, on the small rural community of Little Hintock, have an obvious affinity with the plots of other Hardy novels, from Under the Greenwood Tree fifteen years earlier, to Tess of the D'Urberuilles four years later.