![]() ![]() ![]() In March he contracts with his sometime employer, architect John Hicks, to work on a church restoration in St Juliot, Cornwall. His early love, his cousin Tryphena, has moved to London and Hardy is withdrawing from the relationship. At the start of 1870, his thirtieth birthday approaching and one unpublished ‘failed’ novel ( The Poor Man and the Lady) behind him, Hardy is working on a second, Desperate Remedies. The years from 1870 to 1874 (when Madding Crowd would be published) see him poised uncertainly between his work as a jobbing architect and his prospects and ambitions as a writer, and they contain several decisive events in his life. This is in part to do with where its writing and publication fall in Hardy’s life and his development as a writer.įar From the Madding Crowd is Hardy’s fifth written (fourth published) novel, but arguably his first major work, and it comes at a significant juncture. This being Hardy, there is much unhappiness along the way yet even while it contains the desperate death of a young woman and newborn baby, a murder and attempted suicide, betrayal inside and outside marriage, and the usual Hardyesque havoc wrought by nature or accident, it turns finally in a benevolent direction. ![]() ![]() To begin at the end – Far From the Madding Crowd is one of Thomas Hardy’s happier novels, which is to say, it ends happily. Far From the Madding Crowd has disaster and desperation within it, but it remains one of Hardy’s most optimistic novels. ![]()
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