Far from the Madding Crowd return, Boldwood offers his rival a large bribe to give up Bathsheba. Troy pretends to consider the offer, then scornfully announces they are already married. Boldwood withdraws, humiliated, and vows revenge. Bathsheba soon discovers that her new husband is an improvident gambler with little interest in farming. Worse, she begins to suspect he does not love her. In fact, Troy's heart belongs to her former servant, Fanny Robin. Before meeting Bathsheba, Troy had promised to marry Fanny; on the wedding day, however, the luckless girl went to the wrong church. She explained her mistake, but Troy, humiliated at being left
A Pair of Blue Eyes Hardy's novels to be published and the first to bear his name. It was first serialised in "Tinsley's Magazine" between September 1872 and July 1873. The novel is notable for the strong parallels to Hardy and his first wife Emma Gifford. In fact, of Hardy's early novels, this is probably the most densely populated with autobiographical events. A review in the "Examiner" of "Far from the Madding Crowd" retrospectively referred to it as 'not so exclusively pictoral [as "Under the Greenwood Tree"]; it was study of a more tragic kind, with more complex characters and a more stirring plot... Both