Thomas Hardy is famous for cruelty — for the pitiless fate that grinds down Tess and Jude. So it is worth remembering that his first great success was also his warmest: Far from the Madding Crowd, the one Hardy novel that lets its heroine live, learn, and be happy.
Bathsheba Everdene is one of the first truly independent women in English fiction — a woman who inherits a farm and runs it herself, who has no need of a husband and says so. Three men want her: the steady shepherd Gabriel Oak, the respectable farmer Boldwood, and the dashing soldier Troy. The novel is her education in the difference between the love that dazzles and the love that endures, and it costs her dearly — but not everything.
Around the human drama Hardy paints the vanishing world of rural England — the sheep-shearing, the harvest, the storm that Gabriel and Bathsheba fight through the night to save the ricks — with a tenderness that makes the book feel like a farewell to a way of life. It is the best place to begin with Hardy, before the darkness closes in.
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