48 pages • 1 hour read
The Woodlanders
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Chapters 41-48Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 41 Summary
Giles tells Grace that it is impossible for them to reach Sherton that night due to the distance and bad weather. He suggests that Grace stay in his cottage while he sleeps in a “snug place” (251) nearby. She reluctantly agrees. However, Giles’s “snug place” is, in fact, “a wretched little shelter of the roughest kind” (251), which barely keeps the rain or wind out. The next day, talking to her though the cottage window and concealing himself, Giles suggests waiting a few more days before they travel. This is purportedly due to business he has, and to give Dr. Fitzpiers time to disappear. In reality, Giles is severely ill and hopes to recover. Suspecting the truth, the next night Grace calls to Giles to come inside the cottage, but he insists that he is fine.
Chapter 42 Summary
The next day Giles does not show up for the breakfast Grace has made. She wants to go and find him but is worried about being seen. He does not come for the dinner she has made either, and she hears a cough and a feverish muttering nearby. Grace realizes that it must be Giles and leaves the cottage to find him. She discovers him lying on the floor in a hovel, feverish and soaked through with rain. Grace carries the sick Giles into the cottage and puts him on the bed. Taking off his wet clothes, she bathes his head and tends to him. Seeing that medical assistance is necessary, she goes to find Dr. Fitzpiers, who agrees to help Giles. He does not realize though that the woman calling him to help someone at the window is his wife.
Chapter 43 Summary
Dr. Fitzpiers reaches the cottage after Grace and recognizes both her and Giles. His diagnosis is that Giles is dying, probably from typhoid, and that nothing can be done. An hour after the doctor’s arrival, Giles loses consciousness and dies. Dr. Fitzpiers reveals that Mrs. Charmond is also dead. Grace lies to Dr. Fitzpiers about having lived and slept with Giles in his absence. Dr. Fitzpiers, who had hoped to reconcile with Grace, leaves when she rebukes him. Marty and the Melburys then arrive to help Grace. Her father confirms that Mrs. Charmond is dead. She was shot by an ex-lover following a quarrel with Dr. Fitzpiers over her having artificial hair. He had found this out from a letter written to him by Marty. Grace agrees to return home on the condition that Dr. Fitzpiers leaves the Melbury house, which he does the next morning.
Chapter 44 Summary
The next day, Grace gets sick, most likely from having kissed Giles while he had typhoid. Grace, though, takes a remedy left for her by Dr. Fitzpiers and quickly recovers. She reflects on Dr. Fitzpiers’s intelligence, and says, “why could he not have had more principle, so as to turn his great talents to good account” (273). Grace then visits Marty, and they go to Giles’s grave together. Grace feels responsibility and guilt for Giles’s death. Living now in Exonbury, Dr. Fitzpiers often walks near and around Little Hintock. On one of these walks, he sees Marty working by her house. Dr. Fitzpiers offers to buy Giles’s apple-mill and press for her. She reveals to Dr. Fitzpiers that Giles had not slept with Grace but had offered up his cottage to her.
Chapter 45 Summary
After “weeks and months of mourning for Winterborne” (277), Grace receives a letter from Dr. Fitzpiers on Valentine’s Day. He tells her that he has acquired a new practice and asks if she will meet him, with a view to a possible reunion. Grace agrees to a meeting to allay her fears over responsibility for Giles’s death. She hopes to do this by asking Dr. Fitzpiers’s medical opinion. They meet on a nearby hill, and Dr. Fitzpiers assures Grace that it was not giving up his cottage but underlying illness which caused Giles’s demise. Dr. Fitzpiers tells Grace that he loves her, and she starts to soften toward him. She tells him that they can see each other again in a fortnight.
Chapter 46 Summary
Dr. Fitzpiers approaches Grace while she is relaxing in her father’s garden, earlier than the next agreed date for their meeting. He tells Grace that he is becoming “practical,” and he asks her “to burn—or, at least, get rid of—all my philosophical literature” (286) left on the bookcases in their former rooms. Grace admits to him that she attempted to have their marriage annulled. However, she is going to try to love him again. In his wanderings near the Melbury house and his fortnightly meetings with Grace, Dr. Fitzpiers has been spotted by Timothy Tangs, the husband of Suke, who lives in an adjoining cottage. Tim, suspecting Suke’s affair with Dr. Fitzpiers, blames Dr. Fitzpiers for the failure of his marriage. Emigrating shortly to New Zealand, he hopes to first revenge himself against Dr. Fitzpiers by laying a trap for him along the path that Dr. Fitzpiers usually walks.
Chapter 47 Summary
Tangs retires home after laying the trap. He had not anticipated though that Grace would come out to meet Dr. Fitzpiers along the same path, or that Fitzpiers would stop and wait by a tree before curtailing his typical route. As such, it is Grace not Fitzpiers who triggers the trap, catching her dress in it but not being hurt. To free herself, she takes off the skirt of the dress. She then hides in case a passerby should see her. Dr. Fitzpiers, some distance off, heard her scream but did not see her. When he then encounters the mangled dress of his wife, he assumes that she is dead and cries out in despair and anguish. Grace then reveals herself and explains what happened. Dr. Fitzpiers’s reaction at her presumed death proves to her the depth of his love and precipitates their romantic reunion. They continue walking into the woods then decide to spend the night together at the “Earl of Wessex” hotel in Sherton.
Chapter 48 Summary
When Grace does not return that evening, and not knowing about her meeting with Dr. Fitzpiers, Mr. Melbury sets out with a party of men to find her. One of the men’s wives says that they heard a scream earlier, and they discover the trap with scraps of Grace’s dress. These events increase the party’s alarm, as does a report that she was seen being held by a man. The group keeps on looking until they get all the way to Sherton. There, Mr. Melbury finds Grace, unharmed, in the “Earl of Wessex.” She updates him on what has happened and her reunion with Dr. Fitzpiers. Frustrated but relieved, Mr. Melbury and the party stop at The Three Tuns tavern for food and drink before the long walk back. Inside, they exchange anecdotes about marriage and courtship. The group returns to Little Hintock via the church, where they see Marty. Marty goes to the grave of Giles, now for the first time in the absence of Grace. She declares over the headstone, “you are mine, and on’y mine” (304), and that she “never can forget’ ee” (305).
Chapters 41-48 Analysis
As Giles lies dying in his cottage, Grace reflects that he has “immolated himself for her comfort” (264). In other words, Giles’s actions are to protect Grace from the weather and from scandal. Giles appears here as a true tragic hero, but it’s important to ask whether his sacrifices were warranted. One obvious way of looking at Giles’s actions and motives are as a plot device. His death results in Grace and Dr. Fitzpiers reconciling, thus moving the story along. Giles’s role as a tragic hero also bears review. To potentially sacrifice one’s life for someone, in certain circumstances, is understandable, especially if it is to save a life. To sacrifice oneself as Giles did, however, for the sake of convention, is harder to grasp. Giles and Grace live in a time when an unmarried couple cannot sleep in the same room together without appearing “perverse.” Yet Grace herself doesn’t care about honor when she learns that Giles might be sick: “Come to me!” she says, “I don’t mind what they say or what they think anymore” (257). Grace gives Giles permission to break convention, but he refuses.
Giles’s refusal is also up for questioning. His willingness to sacrifice himself for Grace’s “honour,” in a wood where no one can see them anyway, does not just stem from a slavish obedience to social norms and propriety. Rather, it comes from a strange desire to deify Grace. Reverting to an attitude he had at the novel’s start, Giles seeks to romanticize his own life by casting Grace as a perfect being unable to even bear mild discomfort. When Giles is in a state of feverish delirium, for instance, Grace observes that he seemed “to look upon her as some angel or other supernatural creature” (260). More sympathetically, though, one could see his sacrifice as a last attempt to preserve something special with Grace. After the failure of Mr. Melbury to get a divorce for Grace, and her marriage proving “hopelessly unalterable” (255), Giles seeks to maintain his position as the “one man on earth in whom she believed absolutely” (252). This could only be achieved by not giving Grace any reason to challenge the purity of his character. And this means, in turn, however unreasonable it might seem by modern standards, surrendering his own health for the sake of her dignity was unnecessary by modern standards but necessary (at least to Giles) in the text.
Either way, Giles’s actions prompt Grace to make her own sacrifices, which are more practical than his but no less significant. Whereas Giles sacrifices himself for the sake of propriety, Grace sacrifices propriety for the sake of Giles. She not only takes him into the cottage with her and lays him on the bed, but she also removes all his damp clothing. She then tends to him and kisses his hands, face, and hair. Grace risks her own reputation, as well as illness, for the sake of showing him love. She is also willing to “sink all regard of personal consequences” (261) and contact Dr. Fitzpiers. To help Giles, she is willing to swallow her pride and talk to the man who betrayed and hurt her in the deepest way. She also accepts effacing her initial plan and her desire to run away from him.
However, unlike Giles, or Marty at the end of the story, Grace’s sacrifices have a limit. Grace goes back home rather than staying in the woods once Giles has died. Despite at first saying, “I don’t care! I wish to die” (267), when Dr. Fitzpiers advises her to take a medicine to prevent the onset of typhoid, she later takes it when ill. She also seeks to exorcise any guilt she might have had over Giles’s death. She does this by seeking the medical reassurance of Dr. Fitzpiers that Giles would likely have died anyway. Most significantly, she accepts a repentant Dr. Fitzpiers back into her life. She heeds her husband’s advice to “get your heart out of that grave” (287) and tries to start a normal life again, after an appropriate period of mourning. The narrative symbolizes her shift by her stopping the ritual, on the night she is fully reunited with Dr. Fitzpiers, of going to Giles’s grave. In contrast, Marty remains committed to these visits. Unlike Grace, she has no desire to move beyond the moment of sacrifice, wishing instead to perpetually martyr herself for the memory of Giles.
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