Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 film) and rural life to be "splendid". His strongest criticism is that the film missed the point of the small society of rural life: Thomas Hardy's novel told of a 19th century rural England in which class distinctions and unyielding social codes surrounded his characters. They were far from the madding crowd whether they liked it or not, and got tangled in each other's problems because there was nowhere else to turn. It's not simply that Bathsheba (Julie Christie) was courted by the three men in her life, but that she was courted by ALL three men in her life. The
Far from the Madding Crowd an extreme plot ... he is out to subvert his readers' complacency". "Far from the Madding Crowd" offers in ample measure the details of English rural life that Hardy so relished. Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in "Far from the Madding Crowd" to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of South West England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman conquest kingdom, the Wessex from which Alfred the Great established England. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter