Paula's review
The Woodlanders (Penguin Classics)
by Thomas Hardy
Paula's review
The Woodlanders (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Hardy
Paula's review
rating:
recommended for: british lit fans
So I read this book because I love Hardy's work--Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and Far from the Madding Crowd. The Woodlanders isn't as famous as these three.
It's interesting to read Hardy and D.H. Lawrence together. Both focus on themes of marital/sexual alienation, discovery, and rebellion, and have great sympathy for women. Both were also poets, and Hardy went so far as to shun novel-writing for poetry later in his life, believing many of his novels, because they were serialized, to be too influenced by commercial necessity. As a writer, Lawrence is the more "modern" and self-consciously experimental of the two. Hardy is more austere in style, while at the same time more optimistic than Lawrence about the possibility of human goodness. Both writers were regarded as controversial in their lifetimes due to their frank treatment of sex and their latent critiques of the English class system.
The Woodlanders is a story about Grace and her close-quarters r...more
It's interesting to read Hardy and D.H. Lawrence together. Both focus on themes of marital/sexual alienation, discovery, and rebellion, and have great sympathy for women. Both were also poets, and Hardy went so far as to shun novel-writing for poetry later in his life, believing many of his novels, because they were serialized, to be too influenced by commercial necessity. As a writer, Lawrence is the more "modern" and self-consciously experimental of the two. Hardy is more austere in style, while at the same time more optimistic than Lawrence about the possibility of human goodness. Both writers were regarded as controversial in their lifetimes due to their frank treatment of sex and their latent critiques of the English class system.
The Woodlanders is a story about Grace and her close-quarters r...more
