Audiobook · read by volunteers
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Read by Lee Ann Howlett, Simon Evers, Patti Brugman, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), E. Plein, hefyd, Tracey Norman, J. M. Smallheer, Sarah Jennings, George Deprez, PhD · 57 chapters · 14 h 40
About the book
Gabriel Oak is a young sheep farmer with a little land, a good dog and a plain way of speaking. Bathsheba Everdene is a spirited newcomer to the district, proud of her independence and in no hurry to belong to anyone. When Gabriel proposes, she turns him down, and fortune soon carries the two of them in very different directions. Then Bathsheba inherits a farm and sets out to run it herself, to the astonishment of every man in the parish. Three men come to matter to her: the steady shepherd, a respectable and solitary landowner, and a dashing sergeant with a bright smile. Over the seasons of lambing, shearing, harvest and storm, this long, warm and sometimes dark novel follows the choices of a woman who refuses to be managed. Fifty-seven recordings invite you into Wessex.
Introduction
Thomas Hardy, born in Dorset in 1840 and trained as an architect before he turned to writing, published Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874. It was his fourth novel and the one that made his name. It first appeared anonymously in monthly instalments in a magazine, and readers followed it eagerly from one issue to the next. It is also the book in which Hardy first used the old name Wessex for the countryside of his childhood, a setting he would return to for the rest of his career as a novelist.
The story is a love triangle, or rather a quadrangle, set among farms, malthouses, fairs and sheep-washing pools. Hardy knew this world intimately, and his descriptions of work and weather are as important to the book as its plot. Readers have long admired the portrait of Bathsheba, a woman who runs her own farm at a time when that was rare, and have often called the novel an early work of feminist fiction. The shadow of tragedy, which grows darker in Hardy's later books, is already present here.
The novel's rural world is present in every detail of seasonal work, from lambing to harvest, and the sheer length of the book gives each character time to become familiar, so that the cast of farmhands, neighbours and rivals feels like a village you have come to know.
This LibriVox recording runs for nearly fifteen hours in 57 sections, shared among a team of volunteer readers. Their different voices suit a book full of farmhands, gossips and rivals. It is a fine companion for long walks, or for any evening when you want to be taken somewhere green, slow and far from the city.
Public domain
Thomas Hardy died in 1928: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text