In a Dorset hamlet where everyone lives by the trees, a timber merchant educates his daughter above her station and marries her to a doctor who despises the place. Around them: a man who plants saplings and says nothing, a lady in the big house, a barber after a woman's hair. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; he said later this was the novel of his he liked best as a story, and the woods in it are not scenery but the economy.

In a Dorset hamlet where everyone lives by the trees, a timber merchant educates his daughter above her station and marries her to a doctor who despises the place. Around them: a man who plants saplings and says nothing, a lady in the big house, a barber after a woman's hair. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; he said later this was the novel of his he liked best as a story, and the woods in it are not scenery but the economy.