Far from the madding crowd (His The New Wessex edition)

by Thomas Hardy

Librarian alternate-cover edition of 9780140431261. Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874 and was sold out in just over two months, surprising even the publisher. The critics were not quite so enthusiastic, though they all agreed on its power, and Henry James 'the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.' Henry James was wrong. Far from the Madding Crowd, perhaps the best-loved and most humorous of Hardy's novels even though the familiar themes of suffering and betrayal are evident, is the product of Hardy's intimate and first-hand knowledge of the attitudes, habits, inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of rural men and women. It would be very difficult indeed to match his portrait of mid-Victorian Dorset before the railway. The mainspring of the book, nonetheless, centres around Bethsheba Everdene and her three suitors. And, in portraying her caprice and willfulness gradually crushed by bitter self-knowledge and rejection, Hardy makes his own point about sexual love. 'Romance', he says should grow up 'in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.' The cover shows details from '. . .The sun and closed winter sky...' by Joseph Farquharson, in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

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