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Sophie Alexandra Frazer, Lecturer, the School of Liberal Arts, The University of Wollongong, University of Wollongong

Guide to the classics: steeped in the arboreal sublime, Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders carries a startling urgency

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In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), the trees sing.

Sometimes the sound is like a Gregorian chant, a threnody from the rustling leaves, the creaking boughs, the undulations of limbs heavy with leaves, swaying in the wind that rushes through the woods of Dorset’s Little Hintock.

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