Far from the Madding Crowd
written by Thomas Hardy
(Book)

Set in the rural West Country in Victorian England, the story features Bathsheba Everdene, a beautiful, headstrong, independently minded woman who inherits her uncle's farm, and decides to manage it herself, which engenders some disapproval from the local farming community. It centres around her three suitors: the steadfast but luckless shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely and repressed farmer William Boldwood and the rakishly-handsome but faithless Dragoon, Sergeant Francis Troy.