Recommendations
Books Like Far from the Madding Crowd
Rural and Pastoral Novels Like Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd is the great pastoral romance — Bathsheba Everdene managing her farm, three suitors competing, the Dorset countryside as a living presence. These 8 novels share its rural vividness, its morally serious heroine, and its sense that the land is as much a character as the people who work it.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A poor Dorset girl destroyed by the Victorian double standard — the essential companion Hardy novel; where Far from the Madding Crowd imagines what female autonomy might look like in a Victorian farming community, Tess shows what happens when that autonomy is taken away; the two novels together bracket Hardy's vision of women in Dorset
- 2Buy
The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
Eustacia Vye's passionate desire to escape Egdon Heath and Clym Yeobright's failure to understand her — Hardy's novel shares Far from the Madding Crowd's Dorset landscape and its interest in a woman whose desires exceed what her world can offer; darker and more tragic than Far from the Madding Crowd but sharing its vivid evocation of the heath as a force in human lives
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
Michael Henchard's rise and fall in the market town of Casterbridge — the companion Hardy novel that shows his Wessex from the male side; where Bathsheba manages a farm with increasing confidence, Henchard destroys a business empire with increasing desperation; both novels are organized around a central character who is defined by their relationship to a specific place
- 4Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Margaret Hale's collision with the industrial north and the romance that follows — Gaskell's great Victorian novel shares Far from the Madding Crowd's morally serious heroine, its romance built through antagonism and mutual respect, and its interest in the economics of a specific English community; the industrial north is Gaskell's Dorset
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke's idealism in a Midlands provincial town — Eliot's masterpiece is the obvious comparison for Far from the Madding Crowd's portrait of a female protagonist managing her world with growing competence; where Bathsheba is learning to run a farm, Dorothea is learning to accept that her idealism must operate within limited circumstances
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The Shepherd's Life
by James Rebanks
A Herdwick shepherd in the Lake District describes his family's centuries-old relationship to their land — Rebanks's memoir shares Far from the Madding Crowd's interest in the specific rhythms and knowledge of traditional farming life, and its sense that a community built around the land has values and dignities that the wider world underestimates
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Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
Sophisticated London orphan Flora Poste moves in with her eccentric Sussex farming relatives — Gibbons's 1932 novel is a loving parody of exactly the rural gothic fiction that Hardy pioneered: the brooding landscape, the passionate farmworkers, the family secrets; it works best when read after Hardy (it's funnier with the target in view) and shares his interest in a practical female protagonist in a farming community
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Maggie Tulliver growing up on the banks of the Floss in a provincial English town, her passionate nature in conflict with her world's expectations — Eliot's novel shares Far from the Madding Crowd's pastoral vividness, its morally serious female protagonist whose desires exceed what Victorian society can accommodate, and its elegiac sense of a specific English world
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