Far From the Madding Crowd

The novel that first brought Thomas Hardy real success, it is a love-letter to rural English life, unafraid to show both its hardships and its beauty.

Bathsheba, the story’s heroine, inherits the family farm at the start of the novel, and is forced to navigate both the challenges presented by her work and by the multiple men in her life – neither easy for a woman at that time. In addition to being a classic of Victorian literature, it has been called an early feminist novel, thanks to the r...