This became the archetypal - and literal - cliff-hanger of Victorian prose. 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. Anyone expecting a happy ending should not be reading this book.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. The finest English novel.-Arnold Bennett From the. It is a literary masterpiece and a great demonstration of how life is not fair and how the different classes and society groups operate. 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. Review: The Woodlanders User Review - Jessica - Goodreads. The Woodlanders is the fourth Hardy novel I have read and I have enjoyed how the settings have kept changing through his fictional Wessex. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. This portrait of five people in an English village who are tangled in a drama of passion, betrayal, poverty, and pride of place richly demonstrates all of Hardy’s distinguishing qualities. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The Woodlanders (1887) was Thomas Hardy’s own favorite among his stories, and no other book of his more fully represents the many sides of his genius. 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.

The woodlanders book