Far from the Madding Crowd

This is my 5th book for the classics challenge. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't read any Thomas Hardy before and had been meaning to read this for a long time, mainly because I love the title. Hardy grew up in the southwest of England in a still very rural area. He sets this book and his others in a fictionalized region similar to his childhood home. The hero of the book, Gabriel Oak, is at the beginning trying to establish himself as a farmer and therefore move up from being a shephard. Due to an unfortunate series of events he finds himself going back to being a shephard although he has some education and is a highly intelligent and good person. It is although while he's still a farmer that he meets and becomes smitten with Bathsheba Everdene, a young an apparently penniless girl. He offers her marriage, she refuses him and then leaves the area. After Gabriel is ruined he searches for work and just happens to rescue a farm from a fire and that farm turns out to be owned by Bathsheba. She has inheirited from a rich uncle and is running it on her own. So Gabriel who once wanted to marry her now goes to work for her and proves himself to be indispensable. Meanwhile, Bathsheba toys with the affections of her bachelor neighbor farmer, Mr. Boldwood, and then falls in love and marries a manipulative soldier, Sgt. Troy. Mr. Boldwood becomes obsessed with Bathsheba and Sgt Troy turns out to be faithless and disappears presumed drowned. There's a subplot with one of Bathsheba's maids who has run off to be with Troy, had his child and then both have died. This is what precipitates Troy's apparent drowning. But, of course, he hasn't really drowned but has run away and essentially joined a circus! Bathsheba is presumed a widow, Mr. Boldwood continues to press his case and it all culminates in a tragic Christmas party where Boldwood kills Sgt. Troy. Now Bathsheba truly is a widow and has tasted the bitter pain of loss and remorse. Some time passes and Bathsheba realizes when Gabriel says he is leaving that she cannot do without him and has deep affection for him. The novel ends with Gabriel and Bathsheba being married in "the most private, secret, plainest wedding that it is possible to have." I enjoyed the book and especially the end because I like Gabriel Oak, who was a salt of the earth type and never really stopped loving Bathsheba. Bathsheba's character undergoes big changes and she is no longer the arrogant and flighty girl of the beginning pages. Hardy's descriptions of the countryside, the people and the work are moving. He has great feel for that kind of life and the people who live it.