A novel with everything

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first great novel and the one that first made his reputation. It also might be the only real crowd-pleaser among his great works. For it not only has tragedy, intrigue, betrayal, obsession, suffering, and a cruelly twisting narrative—all features of Hardy's realistic art—but a love story that wins out in the end. Plus delightful rustic characters in a jolly, rich pastoral setting that no longer exists, if it ever did.

This is also the first Hardy work to explicitly take place in the Wessex region in the southwest corner of England, an area his writings made famous—despite the fact there is no such place. Wessex is a term Hardy revived from the Middle Ages. He filled the imagined region in the 19th century with cities, towns, villages and bodies of water, often based on real places but with fictional names and inhabitants.

The main story of Far from the Madding Crowd is that a young woman, Bathsheba Everdene, has inherited a farm and is courted by three men: Gabriel Oak, a shepherd who is devoted to her but is ruled out as a suitor due to his low station; Boldwood, a neighbouring farmer; and Sergeant Troy, a dashing soldier. It may sound like a rural romance novel but the plot and the characters make it so much more.

I don't have much to say about this novel. It's a great, involving story with great characters. What else could anyone want in life?

By the way, for the longest time I thought "madding" was like "maddening", and so I supposed the title must refer to being away from aggravating people—although some are quite aggravating in this novel. But in fact "madding" means "frenzied" and the title is a quote from the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray in 1751.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

I'm not sure the characters in Far from the Madding Crowd are always sober, cool and noiseless. They can be a rather boisterous, passionate bunch. Maybe this is Hardy's point, an ironical one. But you do feel he loves the country and the people nonetheless, and the novel can make a reader yearn for the simpler life away from ignoble strife.

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.

Far from the Madding Crowd
(hardcover)

Far from the Madding Crowd
(paperback)