Far from the Madding Crowd is Thomas Hardy's first published novel. I first read his other Novel, "Mayor of Casterbridge". In that novel a man loses his wife and child during a drunk gambling bet. Then he proceeds to give up on drinking for 20 years or something. He gets his kid back after her mom dies. But the mom for some reason tells him it's not his kid but another one? So he doesn't really consider her his own? He still tries to prevent her from marrying one of his protegees for some reason. And then he tries to marry some other lady, who ditches him to marry his protegee. Overcomplicated business all this. He starts drinking, loses his money and dies. The end.

Very uplifting, as you can tell. Hardy was a bleak guy to say the least. This novel reflects that too. He grew up working class. He studied architecture and worked in London for a while. But eventually settled back to SouthWest England. That is where most of his novels are placed. The fictional county of Wessex. He writes about country life, farmers, priests, traders in these small towns. He has a real eye for suffering. These people go through hell. Alcoholism, having a child without getting married or making the wrong business move. These mistakes will destroy them. Poverty is always around the corner. The abyss waiting to swallow you.

So I was expecting this to not be very different. I suspected it to have a happy ending, but not without Hardy's particular flavour of Sadness. The story's "protagonist" is one Gabriel Oak. At the beginning of the novel he is a 28 year old shepherd. He is in that stage of life where you go from being a "young man" to just "man". And a new girl comes to his village, a farm hand. Bathsheba Everdene (her name is how Katniss Everdeen gets her surname). She grew up poor, she works hard and of course is beautiful. He likes her, so he proposes to her. She rejects him. That rejection is VERY funny. "Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband." - BRUTAL.

The beginning of the book was a bit difficult to get through. There are asides in the book, nearly constant, about what women are like. How cunning and devious they are. Miss Everdene is the main target of these. Those feel like a man sneering at you. As though Hardy is constantly mumbling his weird complaints to his readers. Pulling us to the side, making a confiding monologue, like a Shakespeare villain. Women, amirite? Evil, vain, helpless little things.

And people say you must not judge another time by your own standards. It's fair. But I never quite could follow that rule. We get enough of this in real life. Don't the uncles and aunties torture us enough with this crap? I go to fiction to escape all. If it was anyone else, I would have ditched the book. But I trusted Hardy. Even in the previous novel, depressing as it was, the women are not blamed. A lesser author could easily blame the women in the earlier story. Hardy does not. He is a curmudgeon, you cannot imagine him as anything but an old man. But he does not judge the women in his stories. He gives them space to be people. And so I went on reading.

Miss Everdene moves away, and our hero Gabriel is left wondering where she went. But life goes on. He has his own farm to deal with. But then one day his sheep escape the farm and so he loses his main source of income. Typical Hardy this is. Man loses his fortune through completely random acts of an unkind universe. And so he goes from a man who can stand on his feet to someone who must work. He goes about different towns, playing the flute, trying to earn some money. And then he comes across a farm, where he can work taking of sheep. Who do you think owns this farm? That is right, it is Miss Everdene. Her uncle died and handed it over to her. She handles it now. And she is the boss.

Don't anyone suppose that because I'm a woman, I don’t understand the difference between bad goings-on and good. I shall be up before you’re awake, I shall be a field before you're up, and I shall have breakfasted before you're afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.

There's the Hardy I expected. This is written in 1874. He writes a believable strong and flawed woman character. Bathsheba Everdene is one of those tough no nonsense women you know who keep the whole business in order. At home and outside. She is young in the novel. Can't be more than 25. Yet her self-possession is apparent. She grew up poor, it is a running thread in the novel. Mentioned only once or twice, but it hangs over like a shadow. She rejects men, makes mistakes, fights for herself. But you can always sense the little girl, who never quite had enough, and must claw her way to have a place in the world.

And so she does. She handles the farm. One one of her managers is cheating her of money, she takes over that position. In the background there is a plot of a girl from their farm who has run away with a soldier. One of my favourite parts of this book is how the gossip sessions are almost always between the men. They sit around, drink and talk crap, about each other and her. Our Gabriel is quietly pining for her the whole time. He even threatens to beat people up when they gossip about her. It is very obvious to almost everyone else who sees him. But he accepts his fate and works hard.

One of the interesting things about this book is just how stoic Gabriel is. I think if there is one complaint I have with it, is that Gabriel is clearly a projection of the ideal man. Man loses his farm, goes around town singing songs for money, works below his level and never really sours. Or perhaps that may be the point of the book. How some people quietly suffer it all. Which is fine. But he suffers as a character for it since he is a little too perfect. I think, similar to the earlier story, Gabriel could have benefitted from losing his farm due to a real mistake he made. Some lapse of judgement of some kind. Because then you see a man quietly holding it together with even more difficulty. Not because he is a good sufferer, but because he cannot express his shame. Which means his eventual happiness (spoiler alert) becomes even more valuable.

In fact the person who gets the complex anti-hero treatment is Bathsheba. She is the one who makes mistakes. She is the one who messes things up. She is the one who falls short a lot. And she is allowed to make those mistakes. She falls and she gets up, with immense strength. This is the treatment reserved for male protagonists usually. What Gabriel is doing, silently suffering in the background, is what women in stories typically do. It makes for a VERY interesting story. Take this for example, there is a scene where they have a fight. Gabriel goes away. Then some mega sheep emergency happens. And Gabriel is the ONLY person who can solve it. So he comes back into town and does his hero sheep work. This leads to my favourite sequence in the book:

When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.

“Gabriel, will you stay on with me?” she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.

“I will,” said Gabriel.

And she smiled on him again.

They work on things together. That is the basis of their relationship. They do farm work together in many sequences of the book. They have a real partnership. It is so rare to see this in so many romance novels even now. Again, insane for a book in the 19th century.

But there are of course thorns in the way of our heroes. One is Mr Boldwood, another silent type, owner of the neighbouring farm. But the main one is a Sergeant Troy. How do I describe him? If we want to use old timey words, lets do those as well. Lothario. Don Juan. Rake. But for us the only word is playboy. Well, there is another one, but I try to keep it semi-professional here. That is what he is. He runs into Bathsheba one day. Immediately starts flirting with her like a madman. And she falls for him. There is a line in the book:

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance.

Rough. She has never felt this way before. He is complimenting her in a way neither of the previous guys knew how to. Everyone around her knows this guy is trouble. He is the same person who ran away with the farm hand girl earlier in the book. For plot reasons only Gabriel and Boldwood know this. But she is smitten. The more people tell her that he is trouble, the more she likes him.

There was a review complaining this was not #feminist or something. But I would simply ask the reviewer to consider what happens when they are told NOT to think of dolphins. My grandfather did not like sweets much his whole life. Then he was diagnosed with diabetes, and out came the sweets whenever possible. I am not saying what she does it correct. But telling a headstrong person what NOT to do is a great way to end up watching them do it.

There is more in the book. I will not spoil it fully. It's a romance book so you can guess how it ends, which means I was comfortable telling the other details. But I hope someone goes and picks it up from this review. Very worth the read. Anyways, to tempt you even more - some more quotes, mostly about Bathsheba.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

There is a sequence in the book where Hardy treats an unmarried girl who ran away with the kind of patience and love I cannot describe. He understands her suffering. He makes you empathise with her. He never judges her. I don't think a female author at the time could have written Bathsheba either. Because then she would have been a bit too perfect. I suspect they would not have had the space to depict her flaws. She comes out as the most real character of them all.

It is a big feat for an author to step out of themselves in this manner. When they write characters, people often write about themselves. That is why so many stories have writers as protagonists (or antagonists). But to write meaningfully about another persons experience is the real tough stuff. Someone with a different profession, different gender, different whatever. Especially when we write about the other sex, we tend to project our fantasies. That is why you see so many "men written by women", "women written by men" memes. The mysteriously beautiful and forgettable European woman in every Dan Brown book. The bad boy with a soft spot in a lot of romance novels by women. They aren't written like real people. They show what the author wants. It's about how we see the other sex, what we want from them, what we hope to get out of them. Not what they might actually be.

I love classic novels. But it is very difficult for me to read them because the women are horribly written sometimes. But when they are well written, we are all better for it. This goes for good male characters written by women as well (Lydgate from Middlemarch). They make for interesting reads. There is something special about them. They become real because they are the result of all parts of ourselves. And they give me hope that we are not here to only destroy the other half of the world. Very, very few authors are able to do this. Only the best.

Post Notes

Who am I if I don't give you some historical gossip. Hardy was unhappily married to his wife till she died. They came from different classes, which seems to in general be the only barrier to love people don't cross. When she died, she left behind a book called "Why i hate my husband" - ouch. And he burned it. Then he wrote poems about her for the rest of his life. So it goes. This is a really good one. Bitter, slightly funny but sad throughout. Classic Hardy.