Far from the Madding Crowd

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. A sweeping pastoral romance of love, pride, and resilience set against the rhythms of English farm life. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)