Overview: This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous. Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters, Far from the Madding Crowd is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene-and the devoted shepherd, obsessed farmer, and dashing soldier who vie for her favor-move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century...

The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.