Far From the Madding Crowd

Far From the Madding Crowd, published in serial form in 1874, was Thomas Hardy's first successful novel, and the first that he set in the fictional county of Wessex (although the name is only used once). It is about one woman's struggle to find love, and it is also about sheep.

Bathsheba Everdene is the proud, headstrong woman who inherits her uncle's farm. She is young, beautiful, and unmarried. Another local sheep farmer, Gabriel Oak, asks her to marry him. We are in a different world here, where marriage is mostly a business arrangement. Oak doesn't know Bathsheba, but she is beautiful and he is rich. But when a disaster befalls him and he loses all his sheep, he has to swallow his pride and go to work as Bathsheba's shepherd.

Another bachelor farmer, William Boldwood, then turns his attention to her. He is the tragic figure of this novel, a man who becomes so obsessed with Bathsheba that he becomes a pathetic figure. But, in a twist that could be discussed for hours, it was a prank played by Bathsheba that gets his interested in the first place--she sends him a Valentine with the words "Marry me" written on the seal.

Boldwood presses for her hand, but she steadfastly tells him she does not love him. One could get the idea that Bathsheba is a feminist heroine, but then she loses her head to a dashing but callow soldier, Sergeant Troy. In a blatant metaphor, he impresses her with his swordplay, flicking his blade all around her but not touching her. Oak sees what a disaster this is, and tells her so, and she fires him, only to take him back when he is the only one that can save her sheep from bloat.

She does marry Troy, and he turns out to be a first-class cad. He was really in love with Bathsheba's former servant, Fanny Robin, who is pregnant with his child. He tells her frankly that he loved Fanny much more than her, but since they are already married there is nothing she can do about it. "All romances end at marriage," is Troy's maxim, one that caused me to stop reading in my tracks. Just how true is that statement?

The book will end with a death and another wedding, in what could be termed melodrama, but first rate melodrama. I, however, enjoyed the droll comedy of much of the first half of the book. Bathsheba says, "'Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry--at least yet."

These kinds of comments about marriage run throughout the book. This book is much later than Jane Austen, by about sixty years, but some of the same social regulations are in place. Bathsheba, though, is a woman of means by inheritance, and in some ways is a feminist character, since she doesn't need to marry for financial security. But in other ways she is not, especially in the way she handles her fixation on Troy.

Late in the book, Hardy describers her thusly: "She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises." It's interesting he should lay out this basic description in the closing pages of the book, long after we have made our own impression of her. Much of this is contradicted by her actions--she goes to pieces at crises, for example, and seems unable to come to a decision about her love life.

Still, I liked this book. For a Victorian novel it's pretty accessible. I found the character of Boldwood to be indelibly etched--he is the kind of guy who appears to be kind and polite but really is a proto-stalker, and by the end of the book is just a wretch.

I've only read one other Hardy novel, Tess of the D'urbervilles, and that was over thirty years ago, so I don't remember much. I would like to read more.