Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by James Tissot, William Quiller Orchardson and Edward William Cooke. A butler's daughter has published a book of verse, married a rich man's son, been widowed at twenty-one, and now goes about London society as a lady while her father waits at table and her sisters are in service — and four men want to marry her. Hardy called it a comedy and his readers, who wanted another Far from the Madding Crowd, did not forgive him; it is his one novel about class as a performance, and the performance is brilliant. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Frith and Tissot follow the marriage market and the gallery crowd that Ethelberta works.