Far from the Madding Crowd

Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd, loses his whole flock in a night when his inexperienced dog drives them over a cliff, and he comes as a hired man to the farm of Bathsheba Everdene, the proud, beautiful young woman who refused to marry him. Bathsheba has inherited the farm and runs it herself, to the surprise of her workers. On a whim she sends a valentine to her neighbour, the serious farmer Boldwood, who becomes obsessed with her, and then she falls for the dashing Sergeant Troy, who dazzles her with his swordplay but still has a past with a servant girl, Fanny Robin.

Thomas Hardy serialised the novel in 1874, and its success let him give up architecture for writing. It was the first book in which he called his region of south-west England 'Wessex', and its title comes from Thomas Gray's famous Elegy. It is the warmest of Hardy's major novels, before the tragedies of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.

After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.