In his book Fatalism in the Works of Thomas Hardy, Albert Elliot defines nature as `a conscious agent, usually for evil' as manifested in many of Hardy's novels (Elliot 85). This is no more intensely so than in The Woodlanders. As in so many of Hardy's works, the novel illustrates the struggle between nature and the endeavors of man - so much so that it at times seems that nature is a force at work in direct opposition to the happiness of the men and women that people the novel. In The Woodlanders, it is not so much the characters who control their own destinies and subsequent happiness, but the greater forces at work in the universe, which in The Woodlanders, manifest specifically as nature. In other words, characters in the novel are at the mercy of external circumstances, rather than of actions originating from self-defeating internal motives and...