Far From the Madding Crowd is the book that made Thomas Hardy famous, and it is the sunniest and least brooding of his great novels. Bathsheba Everdene and the three men who love her move through a beautifully realized late nineteenth-century agrarian landscape, still almost untouched by the industrial revolution and the encroachment of modern life. Hardy presents the hopes and disappointments of Bathsheba and the three men after her affections: one, a poor sheep farmer, another a respectable farm owner, and the third an army sergeant. Grounded in Victorian romanticism yet paving a path towards realistic literature, Far From the Madding Crowd rightly remains one of the most popular of Hardy's novels.