Far from the Madding Crowd thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited her uncle's estate and is now wealthy. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she employs him. Meanwhile, Bathsheba has a new admirer: the lonely and repressed William Boldwood. Boldwood is a prosperous farmer of about forty, whose ardour Bathsheba unwittingly awakens when – her curiosity piqued because he has never bestowed on her the customary admiring glance – she playfully sends him a valentine sealed with red wax on which she has embossed the words, "Marry me".
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