Originally published as a monthly serial, the book reads like a screenplay, every scene crisp, clear, packed with cinematic action, memorable visual images (those bloated sheep!) and sharp-witted dialogue.

The subject here is sex, sex, sex amid the hay-bailing and sheep-shearing, but told with typical Victorian restraint the resulting subtext is far more erotic than any proud-to-be-blatant-about-it modern work. It's easy to see why Far from the Madding Crowd is still making waves nearly 150 years after its publication. This became the archetypal - and literal - cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.Ī great reason to revisit the classics this summer. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

The madding crowd book