William Hardy was a prolific novelist. Some of his better-known works include Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Return of the Native (1878), and Jude the Obscure (1895).
George Eliot was another Victorian novelist who frequently set her stories in rural settings. Her novels include Middlemarch (1871), Silas Marner (1861), and The Mill on the Floss (1860) among others.
Many of the pastoral themes in Far From the Madding Crowd are also found in Romantic poetry from poets such as William Wordsworth and Robert Burns. The novel's title comes from a poem by Thomas Gray called "Elegy in a Country Churchyard."
