Based on Thomas Hardy's 19th-century novel, Bathsheba Everdene is a willful, passionate girl who is never satisfied with anything less than a man's complete, helpless adoration, and she captures the lives and loves of three very different men: Gabriel Oak, a sheep farmer, who is captivated by her beauty and proposes marriage; William Boldwood, a prosperous confirmed bachelor in his early forties; and Sergeant Frank Troy, a handsome, reckless swordsman given to sudden fits of violence.