Thomas Hardy

When I was at school I was not afraid of telling my teachers when I didn't like a book they made us read. I told them that I laughed and laughed at Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd with the incredibe penny dreadful silliness of [warning - spoiler ahead] the poor ruined pregnant girl wandering for miles in the snow, occasionally using an extremely patient dog as a crutch, until she perished. Sure, I get it: life is cruel for rural workers in pre-industrial England, transport is bad, men are bastards and given half a chance will take advantage of their social inferiors.

What I didn't tell them was that I did wipe away a tear occasionally during those awful chapters, especially when the wastrel responsible for the girl's downfall had the good grace to cry over the open coffin containing her and his poor stillborn son.

Now I'm all grown up and probably less hard hearted, I still have to say that Hardy just didn't know when to stop. I read The Woodlanders recently. The extremely wordy introduction said that Hardy liked this book best of all his works because of the story.

The "story" involves a timber merchant with mixed ambitions for his daughter. He sends her off to boarding school but tells a local lad to expect to marry her. When she comes back all educated and well bred, he can't bear to give her away. When the local lad loses the tenancy to his family's cottage after some relative dies because the lad didn't renew the lease and has fallen out of favour with the local aristocrat, the match becomes completely out of the question, even though the young couple are more or less in love. There is also a local girl secretly in love with the local lad but he never really notices.

A young doctor spies the nicely bred girl and starts to woo her. He soon realises he needs to marry her to have his way (unlike a rather less well bred local girl) but being socially ambitious wants her origins to be a secret from society. He despises her family and takes advantage of them by opening a practice in the better part of the timber merchant's house. Meanwhile the local lad has become an itinerant cider maker and refuses to talk to his former beloved becuase of the huge gulf of fortune between them.

Then, the young doctor starts seeing a local much-married youngish aristocratic widow. This very much hurts his tender wife's feelings. He drinks a lot too. He has some kind of accident and is knocked unconscious and two women (the local slut and widow) insist on seeing him on his sick bed. His wife is dismayed and runs off to the horrible forest cottage of her first love.

The cider maker has been ill and doesn't want her to know how ill so he stays in the dark so she can't see how his appearance has altered. He insists she stay inside and goes off to sleep in a bark shelter of some kind so far away she can't here his hacking cough. She tidies up the cottage and cooks him food. She's very happy until her location is found and she has to return home. Her family has barred the husband from the house.

There's some dispute about whether she kept her honour in these circumstances but the girl in love with her first love sticks up for her. Also the man dies from exposure as a result of letting her stay in his cottage!@!!!. She feels that it's her fault (too right it's her fault). She spends a lot of time at his grave with the local girl who loved him.

Meanwhile the doctor has fled to the Continent with the widow. For months and months he lives the life of Reilly, gambling and carousing with European ne-er-do-wells until one night he's bored. He decides to leave for England. The day later the widow is slain by a jealous lover or ex-lover or would-be lover or something. He only just avoided the scandal! He reforms. For the rest of the book he woos his wife back and claims to have mended his ways. And she GOES BACK.

What an odd all-over-the-place story. There were some very nice descriptions of trees and forestry management practices.