"It was in the chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd...that I first ventured to adopt the word 'Wessex," "wrote Thomas Hardy, and so described the birth of that Fictional region in the southwest of England where the hauntingly familiar names-Egdon Heath, Christminster, Casterbridge have come to evoke the melancholy grandeur of Hardy's world. The rural sheep-raising country of this early novel escapes the gloom that permeates the landscape and the characters of such lar tragedies as Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. But the relentless accidents of an indifferent nature, combined with the ill-fated passions of beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her lovers, create the thwarted purposes and shattering grief that make this a characteristically powerful Hardy novel.