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| Far from the Madding Crowd (Penguin Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Hardy
Creator: Rosemarie Morgan
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £6.99
Buy Used: £1.01
You Save: £5.98 (86%)
New (39) from £2.34
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 13564
Media: Paperback
Edition: Rev Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0141439653
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780141439655
ASIN: 0141439653
Publication Date: February 27, 2003
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Unread, front cover has been very slightly damaged at the top. In stock ready to dispatch from the UK
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Watcher and the Watched: Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd September 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reading this novel again in 36 degrees of heat in Tunisia was a delightful and slightly unusual experience! As I sat moderately baking in occasional shade, Bathsheba and Oak wrestled out their very pragmatic romance amidst the debris and lives of other characters whose impracticality and passion proves their undoing. The novel recommends survival through work and co-operation and this core value in the narrative far from being dull and tame compared to the heated, reckless drives of others,provides humour and finally healing. The scenes where Oak saves the gas ridden sheep and the stacks communicate Oak's consummate competence and care and Hardy 's sensory skills are marvellously suggestive and psychologically apt:
'He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek and turned.It was Bathsheba's breath - she had followed him, and was looking into the same chink.'
Far From The Madding Crowd is full of 'peeping tom' moments where characters watch each other through hedges,chinks and doors! This moment is beautifully laid out, the metaphor 'zephyr' registers the magic of Bathsheba's physicality...even more, her very breath, her life force enchants Oak. She is as special and magical to Oak as any legend from the Greeks. The simplicity of this shared watching explores their natural equality and the unconscious attraction of Bathsheba for Oak. How beautifully erotic is this scene and yet how it reveals their hesitancy and delay.
Hardy allows Bathsheba her eventual happiness which is rare indeed in the so-called 'great' novels, and he is also astute in granting Bathsheba autonomy in characterisation. She remains true to her perverse, challenging self and we do not see a shadowy, chastened figure at the end, though this Bathsheba has learnt about consequences!
' I have thought so much more of you since I fancied you did not want even to see me again.'
Human nature is perverse! This admission is fully in keeping Bathsheba's vanity and wilfulness. Yet is also reinforces the honesty and intimacy that has existed between them. Such intimacy elevates their relationship and makes their future marriage and happiness certain.
A final glimpse, simply because it is highly Impressionistic and tender and would not be out of keeping in a Katherine Mansfield story or a Monet painting:
'Ten minutes later, a large and smaller umbrella might have been seen moving from the same door, and through the mist along the road to the church.'
The tenderness of the ordinary here is palpable. Oak and Bathsheba are granted some privacy away from the speculative eye of reader and community and under their umbrelllas remains sanctuary and promise!
Wonderful!
 Sexual desire and sexual relationships in strict Victorian England April 28, 2008
I have read four Thomas Hardy novels now, and every time I start a new one I find it, like Dickens, tough to get into. This is mainly down to the long sentences. Unlike when reading Dickens, however, after I have become seasoned to the archaic style, it comes much more naturally. It's still hard to breeze through a Hardy novel at the same pace as you would a novel by a more modern writer such as, say, Orwell (who started writing novels only about 30 years after Hardy stopped writing them), but you become accustomed to it and it becomes much more readily comprehensible.
This is a cracking novel, mainly exploring sexual desire and sexual relationships. It's surprisingly daring for a Victorian novel, though I don't know how much of this is due to the version which has here been published - the editor has gone back to the manuscript originally submitted to the publishers (a holograph of which exists, somewhere in America), before it was censored (and altered in other ways). This might be a dubious practice, seeing as an editorial hand can often improve a work, but it has undoubtedly brought out a sexual frankness here which I can't imagine could have been in the version originally published. It is not just in the themes, but in the rich symbolism employed - see Oak sharpening his blades, and Troy's demonstration of swordplay, in which Bathsheba thinks she has actually been 'run through', for example.
The heroine, Bathsheba, arouses sexual desire in all the male characters she meets, this sexual desire sometimes threatening madness and social upheaval. The book shows the strain that the strictly no-sex-before-marriage cornerstone of Victorian morality puts on its citizens, though that is not to say that Hardy suggests a relaxing of these morals. There is nothing here which points to Hardy disagreeing with prevailing morality - he only shown how it can put a strain on human nature.
Two last, minor points (1) I am not sure of the role played by the huge amount of classical and biblical allusion going on here. Is it an ironic devise in which the author is poking fun at his characters and the action? If so, I can't see the benefit of this, which surely only belittles the work. (2) Hardy writes great dialogue - snappy and without the unnaturally formal and decorous tone of so much Victorian dialogue in novels. It is a pity he writes so little of it.
A true English novel December 10, 2003
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have now read this book twice, and both times the same thing has struck me, the ultimate paradox that this book contains unpredictable predictability. This may sound like I am slowly going mad, but hear me out. **If you don't want the ending ruined, then please stop reading here.**
The very fact that at the start and throughout the book, you are not sure who the elegant Bathsheba will end up marrying is concluded when she marries Oak. When I read this concluding chapter i put down the book and thought, surley I knew that was going to happen? The true intelligence of this book is to make you forget what your own thoughts of how the book will end, and go into a state of being simply nudged along by Hardy's elegant prose. Therefore, whenever you come to a certain point, you will find that you thought that was going to happen, but as you read it you didn't.
The novel is not particularly long or strenuous to read, however, it is so beutifully pastoral that it makes you yearn to go back to that time and live as they did. This very English novel is a work of beauty that can only be compared to Tess of the D'Urbevilles in terms of strucure. This is where Hardy's genius comes from, he has a style of writing that is so easy to get into the swing of that you would never believe that it was written over 100 years ago. To conclude, it is not as good in my opinion as Tess, but it is more than worth the effort of reading as it really is one of the most English of all English novels.
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