Hardy is a wonderful nature writer. It might sound like damning-with-faint-praise to dismiss a novelist with the sobriquet of “nature writer,” especially for a novel that is as full of social dynamism and new ideas as Far from the Madding Crowd. Its heroine, the wonderfully named Bathsheba Everdene, inherits a farm and chooses to defy convention by managing it herself. But his able descriptions of the world around his characters don’t insulate them from the social pressures of the 19th century; rather, they energize them by linking his characters’ contemporary dreams and aspirations with the enduring land.
Read more at my blog: http://jqr.posterous.com/tag/farfromthemaddingcrowd.
