The Woodlanders

"He is dying," he said, with dry precision. "Nothing can be done, by me or any other man. It will soon be all over. The extremities are dead already." In less than an hour the delirium ceased; then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing, at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away.

Grace's marriage to Fitzpiers, Giles's sheltering her in the hut, and Winterborne's death from exposure form a Hintock tragedy of mismatched woodland love with classical inevitability, so plot scores 89.

"I want her to marry Giles Winterborne." His companion repeated the name. "Well, it is all right," she said, presently. "He adores the very ground she walks on; only he's close, and won't show it much."

Grace, Giles, Marty, Fitzpiers, and Melbury are typed but warmly individuated — the woodsman against the educated daughter and the spar-maker — without flattening into allegory only, so cast scores 88.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools.

Forty-eight chapters with long woodland passages between the coach-road opening and the hut death; the Hintock seasonal rhythm slows the plot to tragic inevitability rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 83.

Here the trees, timber or fruit-bearing, as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged by their drip and shade, stretching over the road with easeful horizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequate support for their limbs.

Hardy's woodland prose — deserted highways, apple orchards, Marty at her spar-gads — fuses landscape and moral condition into lyric fatalism, so prose scores 90.

Marty South, dressed for out-door work, was in the shed, and returned for more, going to and fro between the stack and the shelter with her load of spars on her shoulder.

Little Hintock woods, the Melbury timber trade, and Marty's spar-shed are topographically precise and morally charged; the woodland is not backdrop but protagonist, so world scores 92.

At this spot, on the lowering evening of a by-gone winter's day, there stood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the aforesaid manner. Alighting into the road from a stile hard by, he was temporarily influenced by some such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he had emerged upon the highway.

The deserted coach-road at twilight and Fitzpiers lost on the hill establish Hintock solitude before Grace and Giles's entanglement — inviting in atmosphere rather than shock, so hook scores 86.

Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's level of intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

Woodland ecology as moral stage — Marty and Giles read the trees as hieroglyphs — anticipates modernist landscape fiction, so innov scores 87.

"He died for me!" murmured Grace, heavily. Marty did not fully comprehend; and she answered, "He belongs to neither of us now, and your beauty is no more powerful with him than my plainness."

Giles dies in the hut after sheltering Grace; Marty reads psalms over him — morally generous closure for Marty, bleak sacrifice for the woodsman, so ending scores 88.