Far from the Madding Crowd keep his appointment with Fanny. Seeing the reason for her failure to meet him, he gently kisses the corpse and tells the anguished Bathsheba, "This woman is more to me, dead as she is, than ever you were, or are, or can be". The next day he spends all his money on a marble tombstone with the inscription: "Erected by Francis Troy in beloved memory of Fanny Robin ..." Then, loathing himself and unable to bear Bathsheba's company, he leaves. After a long walk he bathes in the sea, leaving his clothes on the beach. A strong current carries him
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