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".
Far from the Madding Crowd ask once again for her hand in marriage. She accepts, and the two are quietly married. Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"<br> "Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray";<br> "Along the cool sequester'd vale of life"<br> "They kept the noiseless tenor of their way". "Madding" here means "frenzied". Lucasta Miller points out that the title is an ironic literary joke as Gray is idealising the noiselessness and sequestered calm whereas Hardy "disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of