Eighteen years later, he is the wealthy-and sober-mayor of Casterbridge, his terrible secret buried deep in the past. The next morning, Henchard swears off drink. He sells his family to a sailor for five guineas, a monstrous crime that marks him for a lifetime of guilt and pain. At the town fair, Henchard quarrels with his wife and drunkenly auctions her and his daughter to the assembled crowd. Summary A captivating story of love and regret from the author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Return of the Native Young farm worker Michael Henchard arrives in Casterbridge, Wessex, with his wife and child, looking for a job. ('Evening Standard').READ The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy 'Visceral, passionate, anti-hypocrisy, anti-repression.Hardy reaches into our wildest recesses'.

'The greatest tragic writer among the English novelists'. If you enjoyed 'The Mayor of Casterbridge', you might like George Eliot's 'Silas Marner', also available in 'Penguin Classics'. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, 'The Dynasts'. Amidst the controversy caused by 'Jude the Obscure', he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. Though he saw himself primarily as a poet, Hardy was the author of some of the late eighteenth century's major novels: 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' (1886), 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891), 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874), and 'Jude the Obscure' (1895). Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), born Higher Brockhampton, near Dorchester, originally trained as an architect before earning his living as a writer. This edition includes an introduction, chronology of Hardy's life and works, the illustrations for the original serial issue, place names, maps, glossary, full explanatory notes as well as Hardy's prefaces to the 18 editions. Subtitled 'A Story of a Man of Character', Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. A haunting study of guilt and lost love in 'Penguin Classics', Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' is edited with an introduction and notes by Keith Wilson.

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