Far From The Madding Crowd in Works of Thomas Hardy

May 23, 2024 Connie G rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: england, 1001-books, classic, fiction, thomas-hardy

Bathsheba Everdene, an independent beautiful young woman, inherited her uncle's farm in rural southwestern England. Complications arise between Bathsheba and her three very different suitors. Gabriel Oaks is as solid and strong in character as his name suggests. Sergeant Troy, who lives for the moment, is a seductive cad. Bathsheba's neighbor, Mr Boldwood, is a middle-aged, serious man who is becoming alarmingly obsessed in his quest to win her hand in marriage. The scene is set for an explosive ...more

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Apr 01, 2024 Antoinette rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, pre-1900, classics, british-literature

A story about love and obsession, class distinction and the farming life.

The story revolves around Bathsheba, a young lady who is independent and beautiful. She inherits her uncle’s farm and plans to run it on her own.

Three different men enter her life: Gabriel Oak, a shepherd and farmer, whom she had met prior to receiving her inheritance. He is a good man- steady, reliable and kind, but definitely ranks below her now. Boldwood is a rich landowner and farmer, whose farm is situated next to hers A story about love and obsession, class distinction and the farming life.

The story revolves around Bathsheba, a young lady who is independent and beautiful. She inherits her uncle’s farm and plans to run it on her own.

Three different men enter her life: Gabriel Oak, a shepherd and farmer, whom she had met prior to receiving her inheritance. He is a good man- steady, reliable and kind, but definitely ranks below her now. Boldwood is a rich landowner and farmer, whose farm is situated next to hers. A confirmed bachelor who becomes obsessed with Bathsheba after she plays a mean trick on him. Francis Troy. A sergeant in the army- a charmer, a scoundrel and a very good looking man.

All are interested in Bathsheba. The choices she makes will affect them all.

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”

“When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

Hardy is a wonderful writer. He loves nature and the countryside- he so aptly shows this in his descriptions of the natural world.

“Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some beauty in this life he led, he stood still looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful.”

It was wonderful immersing myself in Hardy’s world. He had me totally involved in all their lives. Of course, I had my favourite when it came to the men. That was easy! It’s amazing how all our actions can affect those around us- even the smallest ones. The intricacies of living in the country and running a farm are well explored as well as the habits of the workers on the farm. Hardy gave me a complete portrait of the place and time.
This has gone straight to my favourites shelf! What also made this special to me is that my sons asked to read this one along with me. Maybe they did not love it as much as I did, but that’s Ok- it was a joy to have them interested!

Published: 1874 ...more

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Jan 23, 2015 Sara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, literary-fiction

Thomas Hardy is a writer who paints. He paints pictures of the environment his characters inhabit, he paints pictures of the society they are a part of, and he paints pictures of the people, and makes them stand before you full-blown and detailed. That is probably one of the reasons I love reading Hardy so much. Each of the major characters in Far From the Madding Crowd walks off the page and becomes quite real.

Bathsheba Everdene is a complicated woman in a world where women were so often portra ...more

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Jul 02, 2009 Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: my-western-canon, read-in-2009, oxford-worlds-classics-paperback, read-in-2012, favorites, british-literature, read-in-2010, everymans-library-editions, read-in-2013, historical-fiction

Update--10/14/2012: I just completed a re-read of this novel. The more I read it, the more I realize that it is simply exquisitely plotted and written. Hardy-the-poet shines through on just about every page as he describes the pastoral Wessex landscape and the country rustics that occupy it. This is truly a gem of a novel, and one of my favorites by Hardy.

***

I just completed re-reading Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, and just fell in love with it all over again! The first time I read the nov Update--10/14/2012: I just completed a re-read of this novel. The more I read it, the more I realize that it is simply exquisitely plotted and written. Hardy-the-poet shines through on just about every page as he describes the pastoral Wessex landscape and the country rustics that occupy it. This is truly a gem of a novel, and one of my favorites by Hardy.

***

I just completed re-reading Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, and just fell in love with it all over again! The first time I read the novel was last summer as a serialized group read with one of my groups on Shelfari.com. I loved it the first time through, but realized that I could find even more in it with a careful re-reading. I did.

It really is a beautiful novel, and so very well written with an engaging plot. The novel is loaded with allusion, much of it biblical; and even the character's names -- Bathsheba Everdene, Gabriel Oak, Farmer Boldwood, Fanny Robin, and Sergeant Frank Troy -- evoke comparisons to vivid images, scenes from Nature, or historical or mythological personages.

Hardy's ability to inextricably link the pastoral landscape of his Wessex countryside with the emotions and thoughts of his characters is remarkable. As in The Return of the Native and the landscape of the Egdon Heath, Hardy makes the rolling hills, woodlands, hay fields and sheep pastures surrounding Weatherbury as much a primary protagonist and character in the novel as the human characters themselves. His prose associated with the placement and movement of the novel's human players within this landscape becomes almost lyrical and poetic; and as I am sure he intended, reflects his interpretation and representation of a time and place in southwestern England that was important to him, but is part of that heritage of what it means to be 'English.'

The story of the romantic 'square' involving Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Everdene, Farmer Boldwood, and Frank Troy is a tale that resonates in each of us. We can relate, at different times, to the motives and actions of each as they pirouette through their dance of Life and Love against the pastoral backdrop of the farms and sheep paddocks of Weatherbury. This is the Nature of Hardy's beloved Wessex.

Like a hound on the trail, make sure to follow Hardy's use of the color 'scarlet' and 'red' through the novel. Read and experience Hardy's use of Fate, Chance, Change, and Irony working their primeval magics upon the landscape and human actors in this great play of Life. Far From the Madding Crowd is truly a timeless work from one of the Victorian period's great authors. ...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Laura (Reading is a Doing Word) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022-read, books-i-own, classics-trad-and-modern, hardy

I’ve had real trouble organising my thoughts for this one so here is a bit of brain dump!

Hardy’s descriptions of nature are impeccable! He describes views of the night sky and storms rolling in and the images are so vivid you can feel yourself there.
These descriptions project a love and respect for the landscape they convey and this is contagious to the reader. The drama in nature is often a herald for some upheaval in the lives of the characters also.

The characters were well rounded and engagin ...more

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Apr 19, 2024 Werner rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, general-fiction

While he saw himself primarily as a poet, Thomas Hardy was also one of the giants of late Victorian fiction (though after the harsh reception of his last two novels in the 1890s, he devoted himself wholly to poetry). Written and published (originally as a serial, as many Victorian novels were) in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd was actually his fourth novel, but is the first of his five major ones, and the first one set in his fictional county of Wessex, based on his native Dorset and ultimatel While he saw himself primarily as a poet, Thomas Hardy was also one of the giants of late Victorian fiction (though after the harsh reception of his last two novels in the 1890s, he devoted himself wholly to poetry). Written and published (originally as a serial, as many Victorian novels were) in 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd was actually his fourth novel, but is the first of his five major ones, and the first one set in his fictional county of Wessex, based on his native Dorset and ultimately also on parts of the neighboring counties. (Names of localities in his works are typically changed from the real-life ones --Dorchester, for instance, becomes "Casterbridge"-- but the real-life localities and geographical relationships are clearly recognizable to anyone who's familiar with that part of England.) My first reading of this book was in the late 60s or early 70s, but this review was based on a second reading with the outstanding Goodreads group Works of Thomas Hardy (https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... ). Links to that discussion can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group... .

This work is sometimes characterized as a "romance" or a "love story," but these labels can create false expectations. It's true that at the heart of the plot is a romantic quadrangle, with young Bathsheba Everdene as its focal point and pivot. She inspires romantic interest in three very different men, with results that will form the basis of an absorbing and eventful story. (All four of these main characters are vividly-drawn, round and nuanced.) But Hardy's approach to romance is more like Jane Austen's than 21st-century Big Publishing's idea of mass-market rom-com; so readers who try to approach it as the latter will be disappointed. The story is about characters for whom romantic feelings are a significant part of their lives; but other aspects of their lives are going on, too, and Hardy's interested in all of them, including personal growth, moral choices, and social relationships, and he has philosophical interests and messages as well. If you approach this through the narrow focus of "Who's going to get the girl? (And how much romantic heat will the plot generate?)," you'll miss significant depth.

To situate Hardy in his literary context, I'd characterize him essentially as a Romantic (and the Romantic strain was dominant in British fiction through the 19th century, unlike the U.S. where the shift to Realism already occurred after the Civil War). He's writing about characters who have strong emotions which can lead to extreme events, and he's unashamedly appealing to emotions in us, the readers. But his work also has affinities to that of his U.S. contemporaries in the regionalist sub-set of the Realist movement in that, like them, he's seriously concerned with realistically reproducing the ethos, lifeways, social patterns and lore of a geographically distinct area (in this case, Dorset), in the face of a homogenizing mass culture that's contemptuous of them. (This extends to authentic use of regional dialect in dialogue, also a feature of American regionalism.) Stylistically, many of his characteristics are typical of 19th-century novels: his diction is complex, he has a big vocabulary, and he's not hesitant about direct-address comments to the reader in his narrative voice. (As such, none of these bother me, but they do some modern-day readers.) He also seasons (and, IMO, enriches), his text with a good many biblical, classical and literary allusions. The quality of literary craftmanship here is really high; this is a very accomplished, artistic work.

He also stands squarely in the classical great tradition of moral fiction; that is to say, he cares about right and wrong in the way that people treat others, measures his characters in those terms, wants them to grow morally and psychologically, and gives them the opportunity and challenge to do that. (Whether, and to what extent, they will is a question that gives the tale much of its interest.) To a much larger degree than most other writers of his day, he also tends to attribute a lot of significance to the role of fate/chance/destiny in human affairs; this is brought out in a number of narrative comments, in the role played by seemingly fortuitous coincidence, and in one instance, the determination of a crucial decision by something essentially similar to a coin toss. (The moral and fatalistic strands of his thought aren't contradictory; chance or fated circumstances don't make characters' moral choices for them, but rather just set the conditions under which they'll make choices.) In my previous reading of Hardy, I hadn't picked up on this; so this read gave me a much clearer understanding of where he was coming from. Being a Christian who believes in Providence rather than chance as decisive in human affairs, I'm not coming from the same place, which made it harder for me to recognize Hardy's stance; but my having done so doesn't keep me from valuing the degree of insight he brings to the human condition here in other ways. (Hardy was apparently an agnostic, having lost his inherited --and perhaps never more than nominal-- Christian beliefs as a young adult; but he was interested in the beliefs of his characters, which in the case of the workfolk depicted here clearly are better described as Christian-influenced folk religion than actual Christianity. That's probably realistically typical of people brought up in a state church, in which adherence to the faith is just assumed as a given rather than being consciously cultivated.)

Bathsheba has her good qualities; but when we meet her, she's immature (even for her young age), vain, unwisely impulsive, hot-tempered, overly attracted to and influenced by superficial qualities, commitment-shy, and clueless about other people's feelings in her social interactions. And Hardy makes sure that we pick up on these things. (His narrative comments often characterize some of these qualities as inherent feminine traits, a characteristic male attitude of his day that's one of the few irritants in this novel.) This causes many readers to dislike her, and to assume that Hardy disliked her as well. Hardy's own attitude, though, seems to me more nuanced --he accepts her as a flawed human, sees both her good and bad side, and views her with sympathy and compassion (which I think is his attitude towards all of his characters). I wouldn't say this novel is feminist. But it has a constructive subtext in that it's critical of the whole idea of rushing into marriage, or into romantic infatuation, with someone you don't really know, based on superficial physical attraction, and extols unions built on tried friendship through learning to know each other in daily life.

Note: This time, I read the book in the 1986 Norton Critical Edition, edited by Robert C. Schweik, though I can't comment on its many critical features because I didn't read them at this time (I may read some later). I just accepted its text for the read, without any reference to the text-critical write-up. But readers should be aware that there are significant variant texts here: Hardy revised the text of the first printing as a complete novel, as opposed to the serial, and did so again in both the 1895 and 1901 editions. The differences include a whole chapter (and an important one in terms of plot!) found here that wasn't in the serial, and two different figures in this edition for Bathsheba's age.

I've characterized this work as my favorite Hardy novel, mostly because (of those I've read) it's the most optimistic and upbeat --or, at least, the least pessimistic and tragic. It was my introduction to his long fiction, and I'd recommend it as that for any readers out there interested in sampling his work. ...more

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Jul 18, 2009 Kelly-Louise rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This is by far my favorite of Thomas Hardy's novels. ...more

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Aug 22, 2008 Lundyn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Beautiful writing and descriptions of the landscapes. The characters are amazing and you really get a feel for their emotions, wants and needs; especially Mr. Boldwood. Well worth the read.

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