Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition, and made further changes for the 1901 edition.

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags themselves.

Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge.

The Woodlanders is the novel that marks the beginnings of controversy for Hardy's novels. The novel has a rustic and evocative setting. It is one of his series of Wessex novels.

Wessex Tales is an 1888 collection of tales written by Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840. Through them, Thomas Hardy talks about nineteenth century marriage, grammar, class status, how men and women were viewed, medical diseases and more. In 1888, Wessex Tales contained only five stories ('The Three Strangers', 'The Withered Arm', 'Fellow-Townsmen', 'Interlopers at the Knap', and 'The Distracted Preacher') all published first in periodicals. For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added "An Imaginative Woman," but in 1912 moved this to another collection, Life's Little...

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was one of the most famous authors of the Victorian Era. Hardy is best known for novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles but he also was a very influential poet.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was one of the most famous authors of the Victorian Era. Hardy is best known for novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles but he also was a very influential poet.

The novel was later classified by Hardy for the Wessex Edition of his works into the primary group of "Novels of Character and Environment," versus the other two lesser categories of his novels. The novel remained Hardy's personal favourite, and is widely acknowledged to be among his finest achievements. The "woodland story" it narrates was evidently intended to be the successor to his 1874 Far from the Madding Crowd, but he laid the concept of the novel aside to try other genres and works. The Woodlanders marks the beginnings of controversy for Hardy's novels. At this point in his career he...