Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17800 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Synopsis
Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

Customer Reviews

Sexual desire and sexual relationships in strict Victorian England
I have read four Thomas Hardy novels now, and every time I start a new one I find it, like Dickens, tough to get into. This is mainly down to the long sentences. Unlike when reading Dickens, however, after I have become seasoned to the archaic style, it comes much more naturally. It's still hard to breeze through a Hardy novel at the same pace as you would a novel by a more modern writer such as, say, Orwell (who started writing novels only about 30 years after Hardy stopped writing them), but you become accustomed to it and it becomes much more readily comprehensible.

This is a cracking novel, mainly exploring sexual desire and sexual relationships. It's surprisingly daring for a Victorian novel, though I don't know how much of this is due to the version which has here been published - the editor has gone back to the manuscript originally submitted to the publishers (a holograph of which exists, somewhere in America), before it was censored (and altered in other ways). This might be a dubious practice, seeing as an editorial hand can often improve a work, but it has undoubtedly brought out a sexual frankness here which I can't imagine could have been in the version originally published. It is not just in the themes, but in the rich symbolism employed - see Oak sharpening his blades, and Troy's demonstration of swordplay, in which Bathsheba thinks she has actually been 'run through', for example.

The heroine, Bathsheba, arouses sexual desire in all the male characters she meets, this sexual desire sometimes threatening madness and social upheaval. The book shows the strain that the strictly no-sex-before-marriage cornerstone of Victorian morality puts on its citizens, though that is not to say that Hardy suggests a relaxing of these morals. There is nothing here which points to Hardy disagreeing with prevailing morality - he only shown how it can put a strain on human nature.

Two last, minor points (1) I am not sure of the role played by the huge amount of classical and biblical allusion going on here. Is it an ironic devise in which the author is poking fun at his characters and the action? If so, I can't see the benefit of this, which surely only belittles the work. (2) Hardy writes great dialogue - snappy and without the unnaturally formal and decorous tone of so much Victorian dialogue in novels. It is a pity he writes so little of it.

A true English novel
I have now read this book twice, and both times the same thing has struck me, the ultimate paradox that this book contains unpredictable predictability. This may sound like I am slowly going mad, but hear me out.

**If you don't want the ending ruined, then please stop reading here.**
The very fact that at the start and throughout the book, you are not sure who the elegant Bathsheba will end up marrying is concluded when she marries Oak. When I read this concluding chapter i put down the book and thought, surley I knew that was going to happen? The true intelligence of this book is to make you forget what your own thoughts of how the book will end, and go into a state of being simply nudged along by Hardy's elegant prose. Therefore, whenever you come to a certain point, you will find that you thought that was going to happen, but as you read it you didn't.
The novel is not particularly long or strenuous to read, however, it is so beutifully pastoral that it makes you yearn to go back to that time and live as they did. This very English novel is a work of beauty that can only be compared to Tess of the D'Urbevilles in terms of strucure. This is where Hardy's genius comes from, he has a style of writing that is so easy to get into the swing of that you would never believe that it was written over 100 years ago. To conclude, it is not as good in my opinion as Tess, but it is more than worth the effort of reading as it really is one of the most English of all English novels.