The Woodlanders

A barber comes out to a cottage in the woods after dark with money in his pocket, sent to buy the hair off a poor girl's head so a rich woman can wear it. That bargain is Little Hintock entire: whatever the poor hold, their houses, their trees, their hopes, sits on someone else's lease and falls in the moment the wrong life ends. Giles Winterborne can tell what ails a tree by the sound of it, and loses Grace Melbury because her father spent good timber money on an education that lifted her out of reach. Marty South plants pines at Giles's side and hears the saplings sigh as they are set upright, sorry, she thinks, to begin life in earnest. Hardy watches the ivy strangle the promising young growth and calls it the Unfulfilled Intention, and then he does the same thing, patiently, to everyone here. Nobody in Hintock is valued less than the two who can read its woods as ordinary writing, and nothing else Hardy wrote aches quite like that.