"Far From the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy

                                                                           

             
                                                      

           "Far From the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy is indeed an interesting and good story. If you are unfamiliar with the tale, it revolves around the character of Bathsheba Everdene who is a headstrong female with a desire to conquer the world. I must say that I liked her immediately. Although the book is about Bathsheba, we really get to know who she is and we watch her mature through her relationship with three men, each a stand out character in their own right. The book opens with an introduction to one Gabriel Oak, a beginning farmer who meets Bathsheba and instantly falls in love with her. He asks her to marry him and she flatly refuses, feeling as if he is beneath her. Not too much time passes before Bathsheba herself inherits a farm and she can sustain and support herself. The fortunes of Oak and Everdene are reversed but their paths still must cross.

                Miss Bathsheba Everdene ranks as one of Hardy's most conflicted and passionate female characters, and with the recent movie release of "Far From the Madding Crowd," now is a perfect time to revisit the book that inspired the film. Though Bathsheba is the main protagonist, one cannot ignore the significant role the rustic backdrop plays, which is really where Hardy's storytelling gifts reside. Hardy painted his settings with a poetry nearly unsurpassed, and the reader is pulled into each evocative scene, where Hardy's characters become much greater because of the tangibility and simplicity of the world in which their often-mundane lives are set.

               “Far From the Madding Crowd” passes a kind of reverse Bechdel test: Nearly every time two or more men converse, they are talking about a woman. When they talk to her, she often responds like one of the women in Mallory Ortberg’s hilariously captioned online surveys of Western art history, who generally have better things to do than listen to men. When Gabriel Oak, a farmer played with understated but unmistakable virility by Matthias Schoenaerts, proposes to Bathsheba shortly after they have exchanged glances over a rustic fence, she brusquely refuses.

                The history of the book is quite interesting if you care to peek into it a bit. I've never read anything by Thomas Hardy before but am made to understand that Far from the Madding Crowd is his fourth novel and most successful. It was originally published anonymously in a monthly serial magazine. (I can't fathom how original readers must have felt waiting for the conclusion of the novel as it slowly unfolded.) Although it was published over some period of time, it was well received. Many readers attributed the book to George Elliot but Hardy eventually stood up and took the credit. He revised the story and cleaned it up some for the 1895 edition of the book and then revised further for the 1901 version. I can't quite tell if the story we are able to read now was fully put together by Hardy or if he had some help with editors over the past century. At any rate, Hardy is the author.

                The writing was easy to read and when I went into the book, I expected it to be quite hard to read, due to my little knowledge of classics. However, it reads like today’s English with more detail added. So if you’re thinking of reading this book before you watch the film, or just reading this book, then do! I didn’t have any trouble so I’m sure you won’t. I really loved how Thomas Hardy really goes into detail about the setting of the book, because as a reader it means that you can create a visual image and it definitely improves the reading experience.