The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Steadiness and impulse meet under Weatherbury skies.
Bathsheba Everdene
A young landowner whose pride, intelligence, and beauty make every personal choice visible to an entire rural community.
Weatherbury Upper Farm
The farm she owns gives Bathsheba her freedom and hands her private life to everyone who works it.
Gabriel lives between virtue and vice, uneasy with both judgment and devotion.
Read →Gabriel's Pepper And Salt Morality
His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to a postponing treatment of things, whose best clothes and seven-and-sixpenny umbrella were always hampering him: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Sacrament people of the parish and the drunken division of its inhabitants—that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congegation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Gabriel Oak is being introduced by how ordinary his failures are. On a workday he is competent and respectable, but on Sundays, dressed up and holding an umbrella that cost real money, he is fidgety and vague, a churchgoer who yawns through the creed and daydreams about dinner during the sermon. Hardy places him deliberately between the truly devout and the drunkards, and refuses to settle whether he is good or bad. His reputation just swings with other people's moods, which is Hardy's gentle way of saying Oak is neither saint nor sinner but a decent, distractible man like most of us.
Oak and Bathsheba
The steady shepherd Gabriel Oak falls for the spirited, vain Bathsheba Everdene — who saves his life but refuses his hand.
The Valentine
A prank valentine wakes an obsession its careless sender never meant to start.
Gabriel Oak
A shepherd whose quiet competence proves stronger than fortune, pride, or spectacle.
Far from the Madding Crowd
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
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