Other editions of book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Set against the backdrop of peaceful southwest England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives.Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter. Eighteen years later, Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds, but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable to survive in the new commercial world, his story is also a journey toward love.

“In a fit of drunken irritation, Michael Henchard, a young, unemployed hay-trusser, sells his wife Susan and his infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor during a fair in the village of Weydon-Priors. Eighteen years later, Susan and Elizabeth-Jane return to seek him out but are told by the "furmity woman," the old hag whose concoction had made Henchard drunk at the fair, that he has moved to the distant town of Casterbridge. The sailor has been reported lost at sea.

Do you enjoy classic literature in easy-to-carry paperback? Then you'll love The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy! Perhaps you read The Mayor of Casterbridge in school as a youth or maybe this is your first time reading Thomas Hardy's masterpiece or maybe you're a teacher buying the book for your children's literature class. Either way, enjoy Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge book today!

From its astonishing opening scene, in which the drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a country fair, to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy's finest and most powerful novels. Rooted in an actual case of wife selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story builds into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power, only to achieve a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, Hardy's Lord Jim...his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.

Set against the backdrop of peaceful southwest England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives.Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter. Eighteen years later, Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds, but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable to survive in the new commercial world, his story is also a journey toward love.