Far From the Madding Crowd

Aug 29, 2025 4:42 PM

Author:Thomas Hardy

With an essay by Ronald Blythe.

'I cannot allow any man to - to criticise my private conduct!' she exclaimed. 'Nor will I for a minute.'

Hardy's powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on Bathsheba Everdene, a proud working woman whose life is complicated by three different men - respectable farmer Boldwood, seductive Sergeant Troy and devoted Gabriel - making her the object of scandal and betrayal. Vividly portraying the superstitions and traditions of a small rural community, Far from the Madding Crowd shows the precarious position of a woman in a man's world.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Reviews

A dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination

—— Paul Auster , New York Times

An eccentric, madly ambitious scheme to display life all at once. The product of a hectically ingenious intelligence, like James Joyce's

—— Victoria Glendinning , The Times

Amazing, moving and lovable

—— New Statesman

The finest novel to appear in French since Beckett's trilogy

—— Times Literary Supplement

Very funny and very sad... A treasure-chest of stories, something to be enjoyed by anyone who has ever responded to works on the same scale and in the same spirit as Rabelais and Chaucer and Sterne

—— Scotsman

Relationships and family life are captured by Anna Quindlen in a beautiful, intelligent way.

—— Good Housekeeping

An intelligent, highly entertaining novel laced with acute perceptions about the nature of day-to-day family life

—— Anne Tyler , New York Times Book Review

Tender, taut, full of insight, yet with a darkness at its centre

—— Margaret Forster

Excellently done; the minutiae of domestic landscapes, the lunatic irrationality of family quarrels, the torments of sibling rivalry

—— Sunday Telegraph

Funny, heart-hammering, wise...superb entertainment

—— New York Times Book Review

A terrific writer... She's changed my perception on life

—— Anna Chancellor

A classic of contemporary Americana... variously funny and horrifying and finally, quietly, terribly moving

—— Los Angeles Times

A book that should join those few that every literate person will have to read

—— Boston Globe

A novelist who knows what a proper story is . . . [Tyler is] not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well

—— Newsweek

In her ninth novel she has arrived at a new level of power

—— The New Yorker

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