Description

Far From the Madding Crowd is the most sunny and optimistic novel of the great English classic Thomas Hardy, which brought him the first glittering success of his literary career. It is a story of love, loyalty and obsession. At the centre of the narrative is the beautiful and independent Bathsheba Everdeen, heiress to a wealthy estate in Wetherbury, who is drawn into a complex quadrangle of relationships. She is the lovers of honest and upstanding farmer Gabriel Oak, the reclusive wealthy Mr. Baldwood and the attractive and reckless Sergeant Troy. Each vies for Bathsheba's favor, but she chooses one of them only to discover that rash choices and impulsive love can bring pain, suffering, and passions destructive to human life.

This is the first of the author's 'Wessex novels', set against the picturesque pastoral landscape of south-west England. Hardy has a fine sense of the past and the local colour of his native land, and as a result his story is steeped in the patriarchal customs, songs, legends and superstitions of the English countryside that breathe through the pages of this book. The reader's eyes are unwittingly drawn to wild natural scenes, Victorian buildings and villages tucked away in the valleys, still untouched by the encroachments of modern life. All these virtues, together with the tight composition and engaging narrative, make Far from the Madding Crowd the most English of the great English novels.

"The theme is right, the method is right. The poet and the peasant, the sensuous man, the melancholy contemplative man, all have their part to play in the construction of a book which ... must have its place among the great English novels."