Abstract
Although Far From the Madding Crowd became the novel which permanently fixed Thomas Hardy’s career as writer instead of architect, its early critical notices, though generally favourable, did not suggest any such future significance. One reviewer of the novel, which first appeared as an unsigned serial in 1874, even declared the author to be George Eliot. But after a few months sales grew rapidly, and soon Hardy himself could see the immutable evidence that he had indeed arrived as a writer: young ladies reading the book on the commuter trains between London and the south suburb where he was then residing (Life, p. 98). Eventually, of course, it became one of his best-loved novels.
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Notes
Nancy J. Brooker (ed.), John Schlesinger: a Guide to References and Resources (Boston, 1978) p. 19.
Ernest Betts, ‘Filming Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd’, The Times, 19 Aug. 1967, p. 7.
Noted by Pauline Kael, Deeper into Movies (Boston, 1973) p. 141; also apparent in some of the reviews cited by Brooker, pp. 73ff. An extremely negative reaction to the film was that of Brendan Gill in the New Yorker, 28 Oct. 1967, p. 166: ‘Would anyone living in the 1960’s bother to concoct from scratch a long, drawn-out and continuously implausible chronicle of life on the farm in a backward, peevish, and heartwithering corner of England in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, on the assumption that such a chronicle was just what the moviegoing public was waiting for?’
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy (London, 1982) p. 160.
This major change went unnoticed by James M. Welsh, ‘Hardy and the Pastoral, Schlesinger and Shepherds: Far From the Madding Crowd’, Literature and Film Quarterly, IX (1981) 79–84, who argues that the film ‘laundered’ Troy’s character (p. 80).
F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (London, 1968) p. 26.
John Simon, Movies into Film (New York, 1971) pp. 33–4.
Harold Orel (ed.), ‘Dialect in Novels’, Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (Kansas, 1966) p. 91.
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© 1987 Norman Page
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Chalfont, F.E. (1987). From Strength to Strength: John Schlesinger’s Film of Far From the Madding Crowd . In: Page, N. (eds) Thomas Hardy Annual No. 5. Macmillan Literary Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07813-4_5
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