Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Summary
Bathsheba Everdene inherits her uncle's farm in Hardy's invented county of Wessex and finds herself courted, almost against her will, by three very different men. Gabriel Oak, a shepherd who proposed to her before losing his own flock and his independence, stays on eventually as her hired hand, watching her missteps with a patience that never curdles into resentment. William Boldwood, a prosperous, solitary neighboring farmer, becomes fixated on Bathsheba after she sends him a valentine as an idle joke, and his obsession only deepens as the novel goes on. Sergeant Frank Troy, dashing and careless, marries Bathsheba on impulse while still entangled with Fanny Robin, a former servant carrying his child, and the marriage sours almost immediately once Fanny dies in the workhouse giving birth and Troy's guilt curdles into abandonment. Believed drowned after vanishing from a beach, Troy resurfaces alive on Christmas Eve at Boldwood's party, and Boldwood, unable to bear it, shoots him dead, then tries and fails to turn the gun on himself before the law takes him into custody and later convicts him of murder. Bathsheba, chastened by all of it, eventually marries Gabriel Oak, the one man whose steadiness never asked her to become someone else.
Hardy sets the whole story against the working rhythms of sheep farming, shearing, lambing, and harvest, rendered with the specificity of someone who actually knew the calendar of an agricultural year, and the novel moves at a patient, seasonal pace that mirrors that calendar rather than racing toward its several tragedies. It was Hardy's first major success, and the confidence shows: the prose is warmer and more assured than in his earlier books, and the disasters, when they arrive, land with real weight because Hardy has spent so long establishing the ordinary life they interrupt.
The novel's title comes from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Wessex itself, the partly real, partly invented region Hardy would return to for the rest of his career, first took shape here.
Historical Context & Significance
Far from the Madding Crowd ran anonymously in Cornhill Magazine before Smith, Elder and Co. published it as a complete novel on 23 November 1874. Contemporary notices were plentiful and mostly favorable, and the serial reached a wide readership well before the book appeared, establishing Hardy's reputation after three earlier, less noticed novels. Its success let him give up his original career in architecture and write full time.
Hardy revised the text further for editions in 1895 and 1901, and the novel has remained among his most read and most filmed books since. The BBC ranked it forty eighth in its 2003 Big Read poll, and it has drawn two major screen adaptations, John Schlesinger's 1967 film with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, and Thomas Vinterberg's 2015 version starring Carey Mulligan.