Far from the Madding Crowd

Hardy's darkest study of a woman destroyed by the men who claim to love her — Bathsheba's story with the hope removed

Another fiercely independent heroine in rural England who refuses conventional marriage — Bronte's approach is Gothic and moral where Hardy's is pastoral and psychological

The obsessive love Hardy gives Boldwood is Heathcliff's in different clothing — both novels explore love as destructive compulsion in the English countryside

Eliot's panoramic study of provincial life and marriage — the intellectual companion to Hardy's pastoral examination of the same themes

Hardy's next Wessex novel — darker, more fatalistic, with Egdon Heath as a landscape even more psychologically charged than Weatherbury

Another novel about choosing between passionate and respectable love — Wharton's New York drawing rooms mirror Hardy's Wessex farms as arenas of social constraint