The Withered Arm

In rural Wessex, Rhoda Brook, a lonely milkmaid who once bore a child to the prosperous farmer Lochmere, lives quietly with their son under the weight of the past.

When the farmer brings home a young, gentle, and beautiful new bride named Gertrude, Rhoda is consumed by jealous curiosity about the woman who has taken the place she might have held. One night she experiences a vivid, oppressive vision in which she grasps the arm of an apparition of the bride.

Soon after, Gertrude develops a strange and disfiguring affliction on that very arm, which withers and will not heal. The two women, drawn together in unlikely friendship, seek a cure from a conjurer on the heath, setting in motion a chain of events that moves toward a grim and ironic conclusion.

Set against the bleak, superstition-haunted countryside, the tale weaves the supernatural with the social cruelties of class, illegitimacy, and rural justice. It is a compact, fatalistic story in which folk belief, guilt, and chance collide, and in which the desire to undo a curse leads its characters toward tragedy rather than away from it.