True confessions. I first read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, in which the willful Bathsheba Everdene is courted by three suitors and chooses wrongly and then right, when I was in tenth grade — Mrs. Blumberg’s English class, Salud! — and smitten, persistently and unsuccessfully, with a close friend in the class. I was not the only one; another friend had a crush on her as well. But she had recently starting dating yet another, slicker character — a junior, part of a cooler crowd, and for a time the embodiment of everything I hated about this cruel, unjust world.
As I said, we were reading Hardy, and it didn’t escape my attention (though I was grateful when another friend, female and sensitive to my plight, pointed it out) that there were certain parallels between his love quadrangle and my own situation. The object of my affection was (of course) Bathsheba; her beau of the moment was the rakish Sergeant Troy, who takes her heart and hand unworthily; my male friend was the stolid, hapless Boldwood, whose unrequited love for Bathsheba drives him to extremes. And I was — well, who else could I be but Gabriel Oak, as solid and deep-rooted as his name, who loves Bathsheba first, serves her faithfully for years, and in the end (spoiler, if your English teacher didn’t assign it) wins her as his own.
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