Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd Study Guide

Far from the Madding Crowd was the novel Victorian readers wanted Thomas Hardy to write over and over again. It is also a story marked by what one Victorian critic called “violent sensationalism” – marital desertion, illegitimacy, death in childbirth, murder, attempted suicide and insanity. Hardy could never wholly ignore the darker aspects of rural life. Yet, as Phillip Mallet shows in this incisive study, this is not a dark novel: it has an extraordinary warmth and charm which makes reading it, and studying it, one of the most satisfying experiences English literature has to offer.