The Uniqueness of The Woodlanders

Abstract

There are, of course, factors common to all Hardy’s novels, in some more obvious than in others, but it is more critically interesting to consider how the novels differ from each other. Each has its special identity, setting it apart from all the others in subject or theme, in tone or atmosphere. It is true that some minor imaginative effects and some more important fictional ideas in Desperate Remedies are repeated, the former in The Return of the Native, the latter in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, yet the contrast between Hardy’s first published story, a mystery-thriller with a sensational and tightly complicated plot, and the others, or with the idyllicism of his second, Under the Greenwood Tree, far outweighs whatever they have in common. In no other of his novels do we find anything comparable to the London ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ situations of The Hand of Ethelberta. The Trumpet-Major is his one historical novel, ironically of the type (since The Hand of Ethelberta failed to ensure a continuation of Hardy in The Cornhill Magazine) which Leslie Stephens preferred, with George III ‘just round the corner’.¹ In his next, A Laodicean, Hardy turns from Dorset and the past to his contemporary world of technological advance and European travel.