Hardy's sunny pastoral of English rural life is his best-loved, most humorous novel.

When Bathsheda Everdene takes up her inheritance at the largest farm in Weatherbury, her beautiful and unsettling presence draws three suitors: the local farmer Boldwood, the shepherd Gabriel Oak and Sergeant Troy, Hardy's dashing soldier-seducer.

Hardy pours into this novel his intimate knowledge of Dorsetshire customs and landscapes, his love of poetry, the Bible and the classics, and his immense unflinching curiosity about male-female relations.