Gray idealises the “noiseless” and “sequestered” calm of country life, where “sober wishes never learned to stray” Hardy disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of an extreme plot into the pastoral world. Its very title – a quotation from Gray’s “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” – is an ironic literary joke. The comparison was meant to be unflattering, as the sensation school – despite its sophistication in the hands of writers such as Braddon and Wilkie Collins – was felt by the Victorian literary establishment to lack both moral and aesthetic legitimacy.ĭespite its happy ending, Far From the Madding Crowd is an unsettling, unstable book. Yet the Westminster Review concluded that, on the contrary, it had more affinity with the “sensation” school of fiction as practised by Mary Braddon, the bestselling author of Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret, who specialised in convention-busting female characters, in melodramatic twists and in subverting bourgeois complacency. When it originally came out, anonymously in serial form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1874, one critic thought he could detect the hand of George Eliot, who was already known for her realist treatments of rural life in works such as Silas Marner and Adam Bede. Although Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy’s first resounding literary success, reviewers could not agree on how to read it. How to square the novel’s contradictory impulses was a puzzle to its first readers, and remains so, newly thrown into relief by the release of Thomas Vinterberg’s film version, starring Carey Mulligan.
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