Description
A literary critic once described his reaction to reading one of Thomas Hardy's early novels in the following way: "No reader can imagine an ending more shatteringly tragic than the one provided when I came to that last page. I threw the volume across the room; I vowed I would never read another novel by Thomas Hardy; I went to bed and stayed there one week.... Within a year, I had read every one of his books." While biblioclasm or dormancy are extreme reactions to any novel, Thomas Hardy's great fictional works are of that breed which evoke strong emotional responses from the reader. Hardy was a master at involving the reader; his literary craftsmanship makes the sympathetic reader as much a puppet of the novel as Hardy's characters are puppets of an indifferent or malevolent fate. Fortunately, in a few novels the author treats his reader more kindly than his characters: this is true in Far from the Madding Crowd, which concludes on a positive note with the pastoral wedding of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene. While the tone of the novel is more pastoral than elegiac, the source of the title is a line from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard -"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife."ISBN: 0804901368
