Linda R. Freeman, PhD, retired after teaching for 15 years on the College Park campus as a University of Maryland lecturer in Victorian literature. She has also taught for Smithsonian Associates, Montgomery College, and for 26 years, at OLLI. This class will cover two well-known but totally different Hardy novels. Published in 1878, Far From the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first major literary success. Bathsheba Everdene, its brave, bold heroine, despite her confidence and high spirits, makes serious mistakes in love among the three men in her life before she finds true happiness. Sober and remorseful Michael Henchard, mayor in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is the hero of this flawed but tragic Hardy masterpiece of 1886. He makes one awful mistake as a young man and pays a high emotional price for it throughout the novel in terms almost as dire as those of classical Greek drama. Some of Hardy's engaging poetry will be read throughout as forms of relief.