The Woodlanders

Thomas Hardy

May 2023 · Xist Publishing · AI-narrated by Archie (from Google)

About this audiobook

To Be or Not to Be Worthy of One’s Love“On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed....the taper was interrupted. And the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.” - Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

After spending several years away from home to study, Grace Melbury returns to Little Hintock only to find Giles, his betrothed, still in love with her. Her father thinks Giles - a humble peasant - isn’t worthy of marrying his highly-educated daughter and persuades her to marry a young doctor by the name of Edgar Fitzpiers. Edgar is not quite the loyal type though…
This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it.

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About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.