‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, Marriage, and Another Novel

Abstract

Some half-year before this, in December 1872, Hardy had received at Bockhampton a letter from Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Cornhill — by that time well known as a man of letters, Saturday reviewer, and Alpine climber — asking for a serial story for his magazine. He had lately read Under the Greenwood Tree, and thought ‘the descriptions admirable’. It was ‘long since he had received more pleasure from a new writer’, and it had occurred to him that such writing would probably please the readers of the Cornhill Magazine as much as it had pleased him.