Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel and was completed in 1874. It was originally serialized in Cornhill Magazine and was quickly published in a successful single volume.

Hardy described Wessex as “a merely realistic dream country” and so it is in Far from the Madding Crowd , where an idyllic view of the countryside is interrupted by the bitter reality of farming life. The novel is the first that Hardy sets in fictional Wessex; he quickly realised that setting novels there could be a money-earner that would subsidise his poetry-writing ambitions.

Gabriel Oak, the faithful man and aspiring farmer; Bathsheba Everdene, the young and independent lady farmer; William Boldwood, the lonely neighbour; and Sergeant Troy, the dashing military man, all lead intertwined lives which are full of love and loss.