This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous.<br><br>Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i> is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene-and the devoted shepherd obsessed farmer and dashing soldier who vie for her favor-move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century agrarian landscape still almost untouched by the industrial revolution and the encroachment of modern life.