Of all the memorable lines in Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, this one – “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs” – may have propelled its heroine Bathsheba Everdene into the group of proto-feminist icons for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The line is there in this new adaptation by David Nicholls, directed by Thomas Vinterberg; it is delivered not (as in the book) as Bathsheba rides alongside her persistently disappointed suitor Squire Boldwood, but as she sits opposite him, quietly, in a muted domestic interior. But it rings out nonetheless. Vinterberg, who is Danish, had to tussle in his treatment of this English classic with fidelity to Hardy, as well