I finished reading The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (1887). This is one of his Wessex novels, stories that take place in a fictionalized county of England during the Victorian era.

I just love Hardy’s writing and often find myself smiling in the midst of reading certain passages. His books tend to focus heavily on character, and I enjoyed this aspect of The Woodlanders, as well as his beautiful descriptions of the natural world. His characters are intimately drawn and their motivations intrinsic to their personalities. Themes common in Hardy’s work—relationships, mismatched marriage, rural life, and societal expectations—are found in this novel, too.

In some ways, this novel is not as bleak as some of his others, and there’s both darkness and light to be found in the story. I have found myself continuing to think about it after setting it down.

“They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet.”