Download or read book Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy Annotated and Illustrated Edition written by Thomas Hardy and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in 1874. The fourth of Thomas Hardy's novels, it marked a turning point in his career as his first major success; it was the second novel which he published under his own name (his first two publications were anonymous). In the early 1870s, Leslie Stephens (the father of author Virginia Woolf) was the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, which had a good reputation for publishing literary works. Stephens read Hardy's second novel Under the Greenwood Tree and admired it, so he tracked down the author and asked Hardy if he would be interested in writing a novel to be published in the Cornhill.