Far from the Madding Crowd at the altar, angrily called off the wedding. When they parted, unbeknownst to Troy, Fanny was pregnant with his child. Some months later, Troy and Bathsheba encounter Fanny on the road, destitute, as she painfully makes her way toward the Casterbridge workhouse. Troy sends his wife onward with the horse and gig before she can recognise the girl, then gives Fanny all the money in his pocket, telling her he will give her more in a few days. Fanny uses up the last of her strength to reach her destination. A few hours later, she dies in childbirth, along with
Far from the Madding Crowd ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly married. Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"<br> "Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray";<br> "Along the cool sequester'd vale of life"<br> "They kept the noiseless tenor of their way". "Madding" here means "frenzied". Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke as Gray is idealising the noiselessness and sequestered calm whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of