Flora Thompson

Phillip Mallett

Lark Rise to Candleford

Kipling Considered

This book covers the range of Thomas Hardy's works while providing a comprehensive introduction to his life and times.

Thomas Hardy in Context

For better or worse, Far from the Madding Crowd was the novel Victorian readers wanted him to write over and over again. One early reviewer was delighted by the pastoral elements: “when the sheep are shorn in the ancient town of Weatherbury, the scene is one that Shakespeare or that Chaucer might have watched.” But what Hardy had promised as a quiet story took off in unexpected directions. Bathsheba is not merely tempted to make the wrong choice, but does so, and is only saved from the lifelong consequences of her mistake when a third suitor, Farmer Boldwood, murders the husband who torments her. Rather than a “pastoral tone and idyllic simplicity”, noted a critic in the Westminster Review, what marked Far from the Madding Crowd was its “violent sensationalism”: marital desertion, illegitimacy, death in childbirth, murder, attempted suicide and insanity. Yet this is not a dark novel. Nearly 30 years after its publication, Hardy wrote that it seemed to him “like the work of a youngish hand, though perhaps there is something in it which I could not have put there had I been older”. That “something” has been variously identified as charm, amplitude, richness of incident and humour, or, more broadly, the assurance that despite the sense that deep social and economic changes are imminent, the closing marriage will maintain the community and its traditional order a little longer. If even here, in the last work he was to write from his childhood home in Bockhampton, Hardy could not wholly ignore the darker aspects of rural life, Far from the Madding Crowd remains the warmest and most celebratory of farewells.

Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy

Simon Gatrell

'Miss Fancy Day; as neat a little figure of fun as ever I see, and just husband-high.' In the small Wessex village of Mellstock, the pretty young schoolmistress Fancy Day finds herself romantically entangled with three different men. Local lad and choir member Dick Dewy has to compete for her affections with a prosperous farmer and the new vicar, the Reverend Maybold. Maybold disrupts parish life and custom when he decidesto replace the three generations of singers and instrumentalists who make up the church choir with a modern organ, to be played by Fancy herself. The rivalries and intrigues that follow are played out with gentlehumour against an untouched rural scene that will not long survive. Looking back to the 1840s, and the world Hardy remembered as a child, Under the Greenwood Tree brings past and present, community and individual, loss and gain into perspective. This new edition combines a critically established text with an introduction and notes that illuminate one of Hardy's best-loved novels.

Phillip Mallett

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