# The Woodlanders — Character guide

> Key figures in The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy.

- [Grace Melbury](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/grace_melbury.md): Grace is the doted-on only daughter of a prosperous timber-merchant who spent beyond his means to make her a lady, and she comes home carrying an education that no one in the village quite shares. Her father's old promis
- [Giles Winterborne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/giles_winterborne.md): Giles is the steady, well-liked woodsman whose family once held the land Melbury now owns, and whose livelihood depends on the very trees he tends. He loves Grace with a patience that never bargains or complains, even as
- [Edgar Fitzpiers](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/edgar_fitzpiers.md): Fitzpiers arrives in Little Hintock with a London education, a small practice he barely bothers to build, and a habit of night study that gives way to idleness. He courts Grace with flattering attention, then finds his e
- [Felice Charmond](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/felice_charmond.md): Mrs. Charmond owns the estate that swallowed the old Melbury manor, and she lives there alone, without companion or relative, wintering abroad in some years and staying put in others. Restless, self-indulgent, and weary 
- [George Melbury](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/george_melbury.md): Melbury is a self-made man haunted by an old wrong done to a dead friend, which he tried to repay by promising Grace to Giles Winterborne. When Fitzpiers appears with better breeding and brighter prospects, Melbury urges
- [Marty South](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/marty_south.md): Marty labors in the woods and at her father's bedside, where old John South's obsession with a swaying elm is slowly killing him and, by extension, threatening Giles's hold on his property. She loves Giles without hope a
- [Mrs. Melbury](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/mrs_melbury.md): She married the timber merchant chiefly to mother his motherless daughter Grace, and she has done that work so quietly that her own place in the family is nearly invisible. Her habit of anxious agreement — the shawl, the
- [Timothy Tangs](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/timothy_tangs.md): He belongs to the chorus of Hintock labor — sawyers, turners, cider-men — who gather at Winterborne's hut and trade stories while their hands work and their heads wander. His world is small and his talk is large, and the
- [Grammer Oliver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/grammer_oliver.md): She is old Hintock incarnate — full of dreams, portents, and a bargain with Fitzpiers that she recounts with grisly cheer. Her compact gives Grace a first, chilling image of the doctor as a remorseless anatomist, colorin
- [Suke Damson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/suke_damson.md): She is the affianced sweetheart of young Tim Tangs, and her easy familiarity with Fitzpiers makes her the first visible evidence of the doctor's careless appetites. Grace watches her slip down the garden path in a shawl,
- [Robert Creedle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/robert_creedle.md): He works Winterborne's cider-house and rounds, dressed in silent relics of wars and voyages he never made, and he is the hut's chief chronicler of Mrs. Charmond's rumored ways. His loyalty to Giles is absolute, and his g
- [John South](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/john_south.md): He is the old woodman whose life is legally tied to Winterborne's property, so that his death will mean Giles loses the cottage and the living that go with it. His terror of the elm outside his window is not mere fancy —
- [Mr. Percombe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/mr_percombe.md): Hairdresser from Sherton Abbas who attends to Mrs. Charmond.
- [Fred Beaucock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/fred_beaucock.md): Disreputable local man, sometimes acts as a go-between.
- [Darling](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/darling.md): Giles Winterborne's horse.
- [Old Dr. Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters/old_dr_jones.md): Elderly doctor in the area, predecessor to Fitzpiers.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_woodlanders_se/characters