Hardy himself called the story of the Mellstock Quire and its west-gallery musicians "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of [the 1850s]".

The novel follows the activities of a group of west gallery musicians, the Mellstock parish choir, one of whom, Dick Dewy, becomes romantically entangled with a comely new village schoolmistress, Fancy Day.

Dick seeks to insinuate himself into her life and affections, but Fancy's beauty has gained her other suitors including Shiner, a rich farmer, and Mr Maybold, the new vicar at the parish church.

Maybold informs the choir that he intends Fancy, an accomplished organist, to replace their traditional gallery singing and string accompaniment to Sunday services.

The final chapter is a joyful and humorous portrait of Reuben, William, and the rest of the Mellstock rustics as they celebrate Dick and Fancy's wedding day.

"[4] The book was originally to be called The Mellstock Quire, but during the summer of 1871 Hardy added significant additional material, de-emphasising the tribulations of the choir and focusing the plot on the love story between Dick and Fancy.

[2] With the new structure came a new title, Under the Greenwood Tree, taken from a song in Shakespeare's As You Like It (Act II, Scene V), and a subtitle, A Rural Painting of the Dutch School.

[14] Tomalin considered the villagers to be drawn sympathetically, and with beautifully turned dialogue, but noted that the author rather distances the rustic characters, inviting the reader to smile with him at their simplicity.

[13] This was something that Hardy himself recognised, and in 1912 he wrote: "In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were material for another kind of study of this little group of church musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so farcically and flippantly at times.