Far from the Madding Crowd. By Thomas Hardy

Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy

First published 1874. E-book for Kindle.

The title refers to the fact that all the action is set far from any town or city, in rural England, in the fictional county of Wessex, as always with the novels of Hardy. Again, like the one other Wessex novel I remember to have read, the central plot concerns the trials and tribulations of a strong woman character, in this case Bathsheba Everdene. The story is told mainly from the viewpoint of Gabriel Oak, or Farmer Oak. As a prosperous farmer, he falls in love with, and proposes to Bathsheba, who has arrived in the neighbourhood to stay in the farm of her uncle. She however does not take him seriously and turns him down. Their respective fortunes then take opposite turns. Farmer Oak loses his all and becomes a shepherd, Bathsheba inherits her uncle's farm. Oak finds employment with Bathsheba, tolerating her cold and rather unfriendly initial treatment, before she comes to rely on him. At this point in the novel, the heroine's strong character weakens considerably. On a whimsy, she flirts with the well-to-do, middle-aged Boldwood. He loses his heart to her, she turns him down, he eventually loses his mind. She falls for a rake, a young handsome army man, without knowing that he has already loved and left another girl, and marries him. The rest of the story then proceeds in a fairly conventional way to a fairly conventional conclusion.

Hardy is easy to read, but except for his charming descriptions of life in the English countryside a hundred and fifty years ago, and his occasionally courageous and modern descriptions of strong feminine characters, there is nothing much to recommend him to me. Bathsheba starts off well, but halfway through the book turns into 'normal' simpering Victorian heroine. It was more or less the same with Tess of d'Ubervilles, though in that case the end was tragedy.