Inhibited by the conventions of Victorian publishing from outspokenness, especially in sexual matters, he is, nonetheless, impatient with its restraints.

More emphatically, however, they reveal him as a writer increasingly critical of the contradictions and hypocrisy rife in nineteenth-century England, dissatisfied with the smug ethics of its conventional Christianity, and more acutely aware of the woman's point of view in a male-oriented society. They spring out of tensions in his own life and are perhaps related to difficulties he experienced in his own marriage to his first wife, Emma. These connections indicate certain underlying preoccupations in Hardy's work of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Associated issues of class, sex, and respectability are likewise important in each work, and pregnancy outside wedlock is a significant feature in all except The Woodlanders. Jude, in the novel named for him, is torn between two women, Sue and Arabella, of very different temperaments and backgrounds, and he is trapped by deceit into marriage with Arabella. Angel Clare in Tess is also allied to a comparatively simple country girl, and like Raye he finds on his wedding day that an important fact about their relationship has been kept from him. Like Raye in 'On the Western Circuit,' Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders is a professional man with metropolitan interests who is caught between a country girl, although Grace is better educated than Anna, and a more sophisticated woman. There are also particular points of resemblance. Misalliance, of temperaments and education. With each of these works it shares the same theme of marriage and the alliance, or It comes just before Jude the Obscure, conceived, according to Hardy himself, from 1887 to 1890, written from 1893 to 1894, and published in 1895. In Hardy's career it thus comes after the novels The Woodlanders, which was completed and published in February 1887, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, completed in October 1890 and published in 1891. 'On the Western Circuit,' which is dated autumn 1891, was collected in Thomas Hardy's 1894 volume of short stories Life's Little Ironies.

The woodlanders sparknotes