The Mayor of Casterbridge, published in 1886, marks the beginning of the richest period in Hardy's twenty-five years as a novelist.
Subtitled The Life and Death of a Man of Character, its focus is the spiritual and material career of Michael Henchard, whose governing inclinations are tragically at war with each other. A drunken impulse has led him to sell his wife at a country fair; years later she and her daughter seek him out in Casterbridge, where he is now a rich and respected member of the Wessex society. However, it is neither his family nor the ambitious manager of his corn business who brings him down but his own self-destructive nature.
Henchard is at the centre of a complex web of changing relationships in a novel of elaborate psychological inversions. And the imaginative conviction with which the town of Casterbridge is portrayed makes it an ideal landscape to frame and witness the inevitable dramas of the human predicament in a world apparently ordered merely by chance.
Edited With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wilson
About the Author
Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840. In his writing, he immortalized the site of his birth—Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. Delicate as a child, he was taught at home by his mother before he attended grammar school. At sixteen, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect, and for many years, architecture was his profession; in his spare time, he pursued his first and last literary love, poetry. Finally convinced that he could earn his living as an author, he retired from architecture, married, and devoted himself to writing. An extremely productive novelist, Hardy published an important book every year or two. In 1896, disturbed by the public outcry over the unconventional subjects of his two greatest novels—Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure—he announced that he was giving up fiction and afterward produced only poetry. In later years, he received many honors. He died on January 11, 1928, and was buried in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey. It was as a poet that he wished to be remembered, but today critics regard his novels as his most memorable contribution to English literature for their psychological insight, decisive delineation of character, and profound presentation of tragedy.
