Essay of the week - Thoroughly modern Hardy: in his depiction of female characters, Far From The Madding Crowd's author was way ahead of his time

But look again at this stylish and iconic production and it's not difficult to see that this 1967 movie was as much about England in the 1960s as it was about Hardy's vision of the same country in the Victorian period. It's not just the choice of stars to play the main roles - Julie Christie as the sultry, headstrong Bathsheba Everdene who defies convention to run her own farm, Alan Bates as the hapless yeoman Gabriel Oak, Peter Finch as the stolid gentleman farmer William Boldwood and Terence Stamp as the raffish Sergeant Troy.

All were good box office and all were faces of the 1960s but somewhere along the line Hardy's story was subsumed by the ethos of the day almost as if Schlesinger was reprising his earlier hit movie Darling (1965), in which Christie played a spoiled and pouting wild-child who ruins the lives of the men who swim into her firmament. She does much the same sort of thing in Far From The Madding Crowd and that might explain why Hardy's novel has been revisited in a new cinematic version directed by Thomas Vinterberg with a script by David Nicolls due to be released on May 1. Starring Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba and It's the fourth film to be based on the novel but it may be the first to be fully cognisant of Hardy's intentions in writing this book, which propelled him to fame on its publication in 1874. Nicolls seemed to recognise this when he said that the novel is "the story of a woman who is sure that she has no need of a husband". Or, as Bathsheba herself puts it in the novel: "I hate to be thought men's property in that way - though possibly I shall be had some day."

Finding keys to Hardy's work can be something of a fool's errand. The great novelist and poet lived a long and interesting life which spanned Queen Victoria's reign and ended in 1928 after the First World War had ushered in the unimagined horrors of industrialised warfare. During that time he wrote voluminously and was rightly acclaimed as both a novelist and a poet addressing such themes as socialism and feminism (albeit often unknowingly) and, above all, he was also a man who understood and liked women for their own sake and not for what they looked like. For that reason it's worth taking another glance at his frequently overlooked poem, The Ruined Maid, which questions the ways in which society once viewed - and condemned - female sexual behaviour.

It was written by a youngish Hardy in 1866 but, thanks to its incendiary subject matter, wasn't published until 1901 when the author was somewhat oldish, being in his early 60s. Basically, it takes a leery look at a young woman who has lost her virginity before marriage and goes on to lead the life of a wealthy courtesan. The story is soon told. Two girls meet by chance in the city and the first reacts in amazement because her friend Amelia had left her country background as a "ruined maid", having had a premarital sexual relationship, only to reappear in London as a grand lady with "feathers" and "a fine sweeping gown". In some bemusement the friend asks Amelia how she too can follow suit only to receive the crushing put-down that such a move is impossible as not only is she "a raw country girl" but, more to the point: "you ain't ruined."

Hardy's inference is obvious. Both girls live in a society which places a high premium on virginity but while Amelia has been "ruined", as it was quaintly known, it is only in the physical sense as she has risen in life with money to her name and fine clothes. As for the country lass with her intact hymen, she may be highly regarded in her home village but she will never have Amelia's lifestyle and its accompanying sense of freedom. In other words, Hardy is gently satirising the whole concept of virginity and society's valuation of it, almost as if it were a commodity.

It was a theme he was to return to in his fiction and helped to imbue some of his great female characters, notably Tess Durbeyfield (Tess Of The D'Urbervilles), Sue Bridehead (Jude The Obscure) and of course Bathsheba Everdene. All three might be considered "New Women", the term used by Hardy's fellow novelist Henry James to describe women who wanted to exercise control over their personal, social, economic and sexual lives and fought hard to achieve that aim. But all three have to pay a price for their choice. As Penny Boumelha, a leading Hardy scholar, puts it: "Stunned, mesmerised, dizzied by desire, these characters act under the power of a kind of natural law that at once motivates and undermines the making and unmaking of their socially ratified relationships."

Given the frank treatment of female sexuality and Hardy's own sympathetic response to the consequences of a woman giving full rein to her libido, the novels were not particularly well received, with critics condemning them as immoral, pessimistic and degenerate. The literary editor of the influential Pall Mall Gazette wrote off Jude The Obscure as "dirt, drivel and damnation". Henry James described Tess Of The D'Urbervilles as being "chockfull of faults and falsity" and even Edmund Gosse, Hardy's close friend, was moved to ask: "What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his creator?" Hardly surprisingly, these harsh comments pained Hardy and curtailed his output as a novelist. When Jude The Obscure appeared in 1895 it turned out to be his last novel and, tellingly, the Victorian age was also almost at an end.

However, to put all those criticisms into perspective and to understand what Hardy was up against it is only necessary to quote the eminent Victorian gynaecologist Dr William Acton, who believed that sexual desire in women was a sign of incipient nymphomania. In his influential study of 1862, The Functions And Disorders Of The Reproductive Organs In Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, And Advanced Life: Considered In Their Physiological, Social, And Moral Relations, Acton summed up the medical profession's view of the ideal woman's sexual behaviour: "As a general rule a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attention."

That helps to explain why so many critics - mostly male - got so hot and bothered about the overt sexuality of Hardy's female characters. Take the famous sword scene in Far From The Madding Crowd, in which Bathsheba is taken by surprise when Sergeant Troy shows off his skill with a cavalry sabre as she stands by, meekly allowing herself to be seduced by his prowess. In the 1967 version, Terence Stamp brings a swashbuckling quality to the scene which makes it almost pornographic in a stylised sort of way that robs it of any real sensuality. Vinterberg, however, has returned the incident to Hardy's original intention. As in the novel, Bathsheba discovers Sergeant Troy (played by Tom Sturridge) in deep woodland at dusk and curiosity gets the better of her as he begins to woo her with his sword-play, leaving her weak with sexual desire, the "blood beating into her face". At the end of the scene he kisses her softly; no wonder she admits to herself that "she felt like one who has sinned a great sin".

And yet for all her strengths and determination, Bathsheba is also thoughtless and indecisive. Acting on an impulse and ignoring all her instincts about relations with the opposite sex she marries Troy and leaves her other suitors, Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) and William Birdwood (Michael Sheen), high and dry. Her decision underpins the tragedy that unfolds: at the end of the tale in a scene of high drama, Troy is killed by Birdwood, who is then committed as a lunatic at the subsequent criminal trial. This leaves the way open for the honest and long-suffering Gabriel to begin a belated relationship with Bathsheba, which Hardy promises will be underpinned by "substantial affection" and "good fellowship". This could have been a cop-out but Vinterberg treats the outcome as pure romance with the happy couple agreeing to finally share "that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam".

Deeper and darker in tone, Hardy's later novel Tess Of The D'Urbervilles (1891) is more complex and more shocking. Subtitled "A Woman Faithfully Presented", the novel follows the relentless downfall of Tess Durbeyfield, another of Hardy's bold and beautiful creations, who is seduced or raped (the novel doesn't specify) by the arrogant and self-serving Alec D'Urberville, and becomes pregnant. This sets in train a number of tragedies, which leads to her being hanged for Alec's murder after a brief idyll with Angel Clare, a clergyman's son who has loved her and betrayed her in equal measure. Throughout this sorry saga, Tess is portrayed as the victim - a strong and untamed woman who pays dearly for her decision to live outside society's norms by bringing up her child as a single mother.

In the hands of some writers this could be melodrama writ large, but Hardy keeps that possibility at bay by giving Tess an aura of humanity and responsibility that makes her not only credible but also likeable. It also helps to pave the way to the creation of Sue Bridehead, who is arguably the strongest and most interesting of Hardy's fictional women, not least because she is central to the plot of the unrelentingly dismal and heartbreaking novel Jude The Obscure. Sue is intelligent, well-educated and sure of herself but disaster overtakes her when she meets her cousin Jude Fawley, an over-sensitive young man with ambitions to go to Oxford. The back story is that Jude has been tricked into marriage with Arabella Donn, a blowzy barmaid who feigned pregnancy to get her man. Inevitably Sue and Jude fall for each other and, this being Hardy, just as inevitably their love is doomed - not least because, in shades of the Bathsheba/Troy coupling, Sue gives up on her free-thinking principles and marries a dry schoolmaster.

Her reasons are at once hypocritical and idealistic: "When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!" When that marriage breaks down due to Sue's physical revulsion, she is free to marry Jude, who has been abandoned by Arabella. However, Sue demurs. They live together "in sin" but it all ends messily with the loss of their children, Sue's retreat into madness and Jude's descent into alcoholism and an early death. Jude's final words should be a fitting summary for this bleakest of Hardy's novels: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter soul?"

But what lingers in the mind is Sue telling Jude: "I think I would much rather go on living always as lovers, as we are living now, and only meeting by day. It is so much sweeter - for the woman at least, and when she is sure of the man ... I think I should begin to be afraid of you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a Government stamp and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by you - Ugh, how horrible and sordid!"

That kind of attitude was almost a century ahead of its time, but it helps to explain why Hardy was excoriated when his novels were published.

It also explains why those stories continue to resonance in the 21st century.

Far From The Madding Crowd is in UK cinemas from May 1