Bathsheba Everdene and William Boldwood

Bathsheba Everdene and William Boldwood are bound by a relationship shaped less by mutual love than by Boldwood’s persistent devotion and Bathsheba’s remorse for having awakened his hopes. She values him as a neighbor and feels answerable for the hurt she caused, but does not desire marriage to him. Her eventual conditional promise, made while Sergeant Troy is presumed dead, offers Boldwood a future to live toward; Troy’s sudden return destroys that fragile arrangement and brings the relationship to its violent crisis.

Origins and Unequal Attachment

Boldwood’s attachment becomes a continuing force in Bathsheba’s life after her Valentine’s message gives him reason to imagine that she may return his feelings. When he offers marriage, she can acknowledge his standing, kindness, and suitability, yet none of those qualities produces love. As mistress of a farm and house, she also values the independence of her new position. She feels that because she began the game she ought honestly to accept its consequences, but her sense of obligation cannot overcome her reluctance to marry him. The conflict establishes the pattern that will govern them: Boldwood reads hope into signs that Bathsheba experiences as guilt, kindness, or practical duty.

At the farm’s first gathering with its workers, Bathsheba speaks of Boldwood as Farmer Boldwood and directs that he be told Fanny Robin may have gone away with the soldiers. The exchange places him within her practical world as a neighboring farmer involved in the search, before his emotional claim becomes central again. Yet the relationship is already marked by the consequences of Bathsheba’s earlier action: his attention persists, while her own response remains divided between regret and refusal.

Hope in Troy’s Absence

When news spreads that Troy has drowned, Boldwood’s hope revives. Bathsheba’s mourning clothes, worn as she enters church, become for him a recurring sign that the waiting period may eventually end in his favor. He believes that her painful experience has made her more considerate of other people’s feelings and that her remorse over having injured him might lead her to make amends. Rather than confronting her directly at first, he imagines a future businesslike compact that would keep his passionate desire out of view.

Bathsheba’s circumstances make that imagined future consequential beyond courtship. She is uncertain how marriage has affected her standing at the Upper Farm, and the estate agent’s confidence in her tenancy had been won in part through her uncle’s will and her demonstrated ability to manage the farm. With rent day approaching, she knows that if she or her husband cannot meet the obligation, little consideration will be given; losing the farm would bring poverty. Boldwood’s hope therefore meets a woman who has suffered a profound personal disappointment and fears losing the economic independence she had established, rather than someone simply choosing between two suitors.

The two finally discuss marriage as they travel from the fair by moonlight, Boldwood riding beside Bathsheba’s gig. She tells him that Troy’s death has never been absolutely proved and that she has not seriously considered marrying again. She remembers her former treatment of Boldwood as thoughtless and wrong, and says that she would gladly have repaired the injury if it had been possible. He asks whether, if she were certainly a widow, she might marry him. Bathsheba cannot promise that she would, though she allows that it might be possible in the future. Her answers keep uncertainty alive rather than declaring a change of heart.

The Conditional Promise

Boldwood asks Bathsheba to promise that she will marry him if she marries again, proposing a wait of six years in view of the rule governing remarriage after a spouse’s disappearance. Bathsheba resists fixing her future so far in advance. She says she does not love him and doubts that she ever could love him as a wife ought to love her husband, but fears that refusal may cause his collapse. In confidence with Gabriel Oak, she explains that she believes Boldwood’s future rests in her hands and asks whether agreeing would be wrong. Oak thinks the absence of love makes such an agreement less harmful than one driven by passion, but his advice does not remove her anxiety about propriety, responsibility, or Troy’s possible return.

At the Christmas gathering, the distant arrangement becomes a personal pledge. Boldwood asks Bathsheba for her word to marry him in five years and three-quarters, provided she is a widow. She is unhappy and unsure what is right, and repeatedly asks him not to press her. He first presents the proposal as a practical compact, but then confesses the depth of his suffering and his love. Bathsheba weeps and agrees that, if Troy does not return, she will marry Boldwood in six years, if they both live. Boldwood slips a ring onto her finger despite her protest that she cannot wear one and does not want their understanding known. She consents to wear it for that night, but her concession is reluctant: the scene gives him a promise, not evidence that she has come to love him.

Return, Violence, and Aftermath

Troy’s return at the Christmas gathering abruptly exposes how provisional the promise is. Bathsheba is unable to respond at once when Troy calls her to come home with him. When he takes hold of her arm and she recoils, Boldwood reacts in a frenzy, takes a gun from the farmhouse rack, and shoots Troy. He then tries to turn the second barrel on himself, but Samway intervenes; Boldwood leaves the gathering, saying that another way remains for him to die. The episode makes the cost of treating Bathsheba’s future as a settled compact unmistakable: the promise was conditional on Troy’s absence, and his return precipitates Boldwood’s final, desperate action.

After the shooting, evidence of Boldwood’s long fixation is found in a locked closet: dresses, furs, and jewelry purchased secretly and labeled “Bathsheba Boldwood,” each with a date six years in the future. The collection gives material form to the years of imagined courtship and marriage that he had attached to Bathsheba’s promise. Boldwood pleads guilty and is sentenced to death, but the discoveries lead people to reconsider his state of mind. A petition results in his sentence being changed to confinement during the Queen’s pleasure. Gabriel visits him in prison, and the villagers welcome news that he will not be executed. The relationship thus ends not in marriage or reconciliation, but in the exposure of a future Boldwood had privately prepared for and Bathsheba had never freely desired.

Significance

The relationship distinguishes respect and pity from love. Bathsheba’s remorse is real, but her effort to make amends becomes a promise that Boldwood invests with far more certainty than she can give it. Her position as a woman managing a farm sharpens the stakes: she is already negotiating independence, marriage, social propriety, and economic risk, while Boldwood’s request asks her to bind a future whose central fact—whether Troy is alive—remains unresolved. The eventual ring and hidden trousseau turn that mismatch into objects: one a reluctant public pledge of a private arrangement, the other the private material record of Boldwood’s certainty. The tragedy arises from the distance between them, not from a love they share.