Far from the Madding Crowd

When Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm in the Wessex village of Weatherbury, she does the unthinkable for a young woman of her day: she runs it herself, addressing her own labourers and refusing to be anyone’s wife by default. Three suitors gather around her — and the novel that introduced Thomas Hardy’s Wessex to the world begins.

There is Gabriel Oak, the steady shepherd who loves her in silence even after she refuses him and disaster reduces him to her hired hand; William Boldwood, the repressed neighbouring farmer whom a thoughtless valentine rouses into a dangerous obsession; and Sergeant Troy, dashing and faithless, who dazzles her with a flashing display of swordsmanship and marries her to her cost. Around their rivalry Hardy paints the whole turning year of an English farm — lambing, shearing, harvest — and stages two of the most famous scenes in Victorian fiction: the night Oak alone braves the storm to save the ricks, and the sword exercise among the ferns.

First serialized through 1874 in The Cornhill Magazine and published as a book the same year, Far from the Madding Crowd took its title from Thomas Gray’s Elegy and gave English fiction one of its earliest truly independent heroines. Warmer than the tragedies Hardy would later write, it is shadowed all the same by his lifelong sense that chance and character together shape every life.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, its title, and the birth of Wessex, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.