Books to Read Before the Movie Comes Out

Our kind of Victorian romance, this story combines old-fashioned courtship with a decidedly independent-minded heroine. The latest version of Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel, starring Carey Mulligan, is the third feature-length treatment of the classic. As in the book, Mulligan’s Bathsheba must choose between three fetching suitors who liven up the screen as much as the period costumes and sharp banter. Yet the novel version of Madding has more room to explore the complicated love trapezoid and all its romantic complications. And even the finest cinematography will have trouble matching Hardy’s rhapsodies on the English countryside, where the morning mist casts “a fulsome yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun.”