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
30 April 2015, The Tablet
Happy ever after?
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