Formerly a prize-winning architectural student, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) went on to become a prolific novelist and poet. Far From the Madding Crowd is the second of Hardy's great series of Wessex novels. The 'partly real, partly dream-country' of Wessex forms the compellingly beautiful and threatening background against which the struggles of passion so convincingly portrayed in Far From the Madding Crowd are illuminated. Hardy's novels Under the Greenwood Tree, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are also published in the Penguin English Library.