Far from the Madding Crowd is the fourth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy; and his first major literary success.

It deals in themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic, but often harsh, realities of a farming community in Victorian England.

It describes the life and relationships of Bathsheba Everdene with her lonely neighbour William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the thriftless soldier Sergeant Troy.

William Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about 40, whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when she playfully sends him a valentine sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words "Marry me".

At this point, Sergeant Francis "Frank" Troy returns to his native Weatherbury and by chance encounters Bathsheba one night.

Months later, Troy and Bathsheba encounter the frail Fanny on the road, destitute, as she painfully makes her way toward the Casterbridge workhouse.

Gabriel, who knows of Troy's relationship with Fanny, tries to conceal the child's existence – but Bathsheba agrees that the coffin can be left in her house overnight, from her sense of duty towards a former servant.

Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him a second time, he tenderly kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, "This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be".

The next day he spends all his money on a marble tombstone with the inscription: "Erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin ..." Then, loathing himself and unable to bear Bathsheba's company, he leaves.

Burdened with guilt over the pain she has caused him, Bathsheba reluctantly consents to marry him in six years, long enough to have Troy declared dead.

Although Boldwood is convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged, his friends petition the Home Secretary for mercy, claiming insanity.

Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751): Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

[5] Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke, as Gray is idealising noiseless and sequestered calm, whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of an extreme plot ... he is out to subvert his readers' complacency".

Far from the Madding Crowd offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished.

[7] He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom, the Wessex from which Alfred the Great established England.

[9] Hardy himself wrote: "I am reminded that it was in the chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd… that I first ventured to adopt the word 'Wessex' from the pages of early English history... – a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children".

The production was directed by Jessica Dromgoole and featured Alex Tregear as Bathsheba, Shaun Dooley as Gabriel, Toby Jones as Boldwood and Patrick Kennedy as Troy.

The novel was adapted by Posy Simmonds into Tamara Drewe, weekly comic strip that ran from September 2005 to October 2006 in The Guardian's Review section.

[14] Hardy's experience of adapting a novel for the theatre was soured by controversy – the managers of the St James's Theatre, London, John Hare and William Hunter Kendal, on reading the Comyns Carr/Hardy adaptation, first accepted it and then rejected it; instead staging Arthur Wing Pinero's play The Squire, which appeared to be heavily plagiarised from the earlier script.

[16] Comyns Carr/Hardy's version was finally staged at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, where it opened on 27 February 1882 as Far from The Madding Crowd, with Marion Terry as Bathsheba and Charles Kelly as Oak.

[17][18] The reviews were mixed, one critic calling their adaptation "a miniature melodrama… well placed in the provinces", while praising The Squire's appeal to "spectators of somewhat refined taste".

The production subsequently transferred to the Globe Theatre in London, opening on 29 April 1882, presenting a similar cast, but with Mrs Bernard Beere now playing Bathsheba.

He constructed a model theatre (now in the possession of Mr Edward Grassby) with designs for each set, so that the Weatherbury (Puddletown) landscape could be faithfully portrayed.

"Years later", wrote Evelyn Evans, "when Hardy attended a performance of Synge’s Riders to the Sea by the Arts League of Service, and watched drowned bodies carried on to the stage, he remarked wryly that his one coffin containing Fanny Robin and her child could hardly have shocked the same audience".

Everything was to be done as Hardy described it: 'The lopping off the tresses about the ewe’s head, opening up the neck and collar, the running of the shears line after line round her dewlap, thence about her flank and back, and finishing over her tail – the clean, sleek creature arising from its fleece: startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which lay on the floor in one soft cloud.'