Perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy’s Wessex novels, Far from the Madding Crowd is presented here with Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. It follows the young farmer Gabriel Oak through his love for, and pursuit of, the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, a woman whose wayward nature carries her towards both tragedy and true love. Alongside them stands the dashing Sergeant Troy, whose rakish philosophy held that ‘…the past was yesterday; never, the day after’, and the introverted, reclusive gentleman farmer Mr Boldwood, seized by ‘…a fearful sense of exposure’ the moment he first sets eyes on Bathsheba. Set against the Wessex countryside in all its changing moods, the novel emerges as one of the most quintessentially English of great English novels.
ISBN 13: 9781853260674
Author: Thomas Hardy
