Far from the Madding Crowd a 1980s/90s boarding school in the UK countryside (published January 2019). The novel was adapted by Graham White in 2012 into a three-part series on BBC Radio 4's "Classic Serial". The production was directed by Jessica Dromgoole and featured Alex Tregear as Bathsheba, Shaun Dooley as Gabriel, Toby Jones as Boldwood and Patrick Kennedy as Troy. The novel was adapted by Posy Simmonds into "Tamara Drewe", weekly comic strip that ran from September 2005 to October 2006 in "The Guardian"s Review section. The strip, a modern reworking of the novel, was itself adapted into a film, "Tamara Drewe" (2010), directed
The Way of a Man with a Maid sexual passions. In addition to the "quite perverse" scenes of rape, bondage, mother-daughter incest, whipping and "odd things done with feathers" to force women into orgasm, the book has a major element of lesbianism. The book can be considered to be irreverent of the British class system prevailing at the time of writing – all women, be they servants or great ladies, are "equal" in having to submit to the narrator's every sexual whim. The book's title is derived from the Bible's Book of Proverbs, where the wise King Solomon mentions "The way of a man with a maid" as