In the Library
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy, 1874
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 57
- Length
- Length 136k words
£1.99
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
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If you like this, try
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy returns to the same Wessex fields seventeen years later and lets none of the kindness survive the harvest.
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Adam Bede
George Eliot
Eliot does the same thing on a dairy farm, but the soldier who ruins the girl never has to look at what he did.
£1.99
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Middlemarch asks the same question about whom to marry and what it costs, but answers it in a provincial town rather than a sheep field.
£1.99
About the book
Gabriel Oak watches Bathsheba Everdene from a hillside; she rides bareback in the dark and does not know he is there, and the whole novel will turn on that gap between what love sees and what love reaches. Three men arrange themselves around her, and what distinguishes them is the mode of their wanting: Oak's patience borders on self-erasure, Troy loves with his body and total indifference to consequence, Boldwood with the raw ferocity of a man who has never been moved before and cannot bear the scale of it. Hardy set this in the Wessex he would return to all his life, pastoral and punishing, a landscape that will not agree to be merely beautiful. Bathsheba is neither prize nor victim. She is the ground on which these loves reveal themselves, and she survives them all by being harder than any of them expected.