Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
Hardy's most hopeful novel, which still means it contains heartbreak and obsession on the way to a love that feels earned through extraordinary suffering. Bathsheba Everdene is a great Victorian female character; Gabriel Oak's patient love for her remains deeply moving.
The case against
Hardy punishes Bathsheba for three hundred pages because she mailed a valentine as a joke, and the moral arithmetic (her independence humbled, her boldness charged against her like a debt) reads worse every decade. The rustic chorus scenes stop the story cold while shepherds philosophize, and coincidence does the plotting whenever Hardy needs it: a dog drives a flock off a cliff, a storm breaks on cue.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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