Page "Under the Greenwood Tree" Paragraph 12

While the novel closes on an ambiguous and even sceptical note, it is nevertheless distinguished among Hardy's fiction — particularly his Wessex novels — for its relative happiness and amiability.

For the critic Irving Howe, Under the Greenwood Tree served as a kind of necessary prequel and establishing myth for the world of Wessex that Hardy depicted in subsequent tragic works: the novel, he argued, " is a fragile evocation of a self-contained country world that in Hardy's later fiction will come to seem distant and unavailable, a social memory by which to judge the troubled present.