Far From The Madding Crowd Summary: Hardy's Wessex Love Story Explained
What Far from the Madding Crowd is about
Published on 23 November 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's fourth published novel and his first real success. It first appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it found a wide readership before it ever reached book form. The setting is Hardy's Wessex, the part-real, part-invented corner of rural southwest England he had already used in Under the Greenwood Tree.
The story begins with Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd who has worked and saved his way into leasing and stocking his own farm. He falls in love with Bathsheba Everdene, a newcomer eight years younger who has come to live with her aunt. They grow to like one another. She even saves his life. But when he offers her a plain, unornamented proposal of marriage, she turns him down. She values her independence, and she does not value him enough. Days later she leaves for Weatherbury, some miles away.
Then the ground shifts under both of them. An inexperienced sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff and ruins him. He sells everything of value, clears his debts and is left with nothing. Looking for work, he spots a farm on fire, leads the bystanders in putting it out, and asks the veiled owner whether she needs a shepherd. She lifts her veil. It is Bathsheba, who has inherited her uncle's estate and is now a landowner and his employer. From that reversal the novel builds its central question: which of three very different men will Bathsheba choose, and what will the choosing cost.
The main characters
Bathsheba Everdene is proud, capable and young. She runs her own farm in a world that does not expect her to. Her independence is real, but so is her thoughtlessness, and Hardy lets both have consequences.
Gabriel Oak is the faithful shepherd. He is skilled, patient and steady, and his usefulness keeps pulling him back into Bathsheba's life even after she dismisses him for rebuking her.
William Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty, the most eligible bachelor in the district, lonely and sealed shut until Bathsheba playfully sends him a valentine sealed with red wax and embossed with the words Marry me. He does not read it as a joke. The obsession that follows drives much of the book.
Sergeant Francis Troy is the soldier, handsome, improvident, a gambler with no interest in farming. He wins Bathsheba with a private display of swordsmanship. His heart, though, belongs to Fanny Robin, Bathsheba's former servant, whom he had promised to marry before the wedding collapsed over a mistaken church.
The themes
Love in this novel is not one thing. Hardy sets three kinds side by side: Gabriel's constancy, Boldwood's consuming fixation, Troy's glamour and carelessness. The book is honest about how badly people choose, and about how a small act of mischief can detonate a life.
Class and property run underneath everything. Gabriel proposes as a farmer and is refused. He returns as a hired hand to a woman who now owns land. Boldwood's wealth is part of his case for marriage. Troy tries to be bought off with a bribe. Money and position shape who can say yes to whom.
Identity is Bathsheba's thread. She wants to be a woman who answers to nobody, and the plot keeps testing whether that is possible in Victorian Wessex.
Nature is the fourth force, and it is not decorative. Hardy's farming community looks idyllic and is often harsh. Storms, fire, bloat in the sheep and the slow walk of a destitute woman towards the workhouse all carry the plot forward.
How the story turns (spoilers follow)
Bathsheba marries Troy in secret, which humiliates Boldwood and leaves him vowing revenge. She soon learns her husband gambles, cares nothing for the farm and may not love her. Months later she and Troy pass Fanny Robin on the road, destitute and making for the Casterbridge workhouse. Troy gives Fanny all the money he has. She reaches the workhouse and dies there in childbirth, along with the baby. The coffin is brought back to Weatherbury and left overnight in Bathsheba's house. Bathsheba unscrews the lid and sees both bodies. When Troy comes home he kisses the corpse and tells his wife that this woman means more to him dead than Bathsheba ever could. He spends his last money on a marble tombstone for Fanny, then leaves, loathing himself.
Why it still matters
Critical notices on publication were plentiful and mostly positive, and Hardy kept working at the text, revising it heavily for the 1895 edition and again in 1901. The novel's standing has held. It was number 48 on the BBC's Big Read in 2003 and tenth on The Guardian's 2007 list of the greatest love stories of all time. It has been dramatised several times, most famously in John Schlesinger's Oscar-nominated 1967 film. Readers who want a love story with real weather in it, and a heroine who owns her own land and her own mistakes, tend to start here.
