Far from the Madding Crowd
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Literary readers new to Hardy's work
- Readers who enjoy English rural settings and nature writing
- Those interested in Victorian marriage and gender issues
- Students who need the English original for coursework
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer modern urban themes and fast-paced narratives
- Readers impatient with rural life and landscape description
- Those who want clear moral judgments and a tidy ending
Reading tips
- While reading, note how seasonal change corresponds to the characters' fates.
- You can read the three male characters as bearers of different values and compare Bathsheba's choices as you go.
- With the English original, read chapter summaries first before the main text, so dialect and landscape passages don't slow your pace.
- After finishing, compare with Hardy's other works to observe changes in his rural narrative and view of fate.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book suitable as a first introduction to Hardy?
Are there many rural descriptions, and do they slow the reading?
Does the Gutenberg edition include notes or an introduction?
Comments
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About the author
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet whose career spanned the Victorian era and the twentieth century. The library holds 31 of his works, including representative titles such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, and the poetry collection Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses. His novels are mostly set in the rural southwest of England, portraying ordinary people struggling against fate, social custom, and emotional entanglement in a somber yet compassionate tone. After the controversy surrounding Jude the Obscure, he turned mainly to poetry. Hardy's work has had a lasting influence on later English fiction. Public information about his life and nationality is limited, so this note is based on the works held and general literary knowledge.
