The Mayor of Casterbridge

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 Hardys finest and most powerful novels. Rooted in an actual case of wife selling in early nineteenthcentury 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, Hardys Lord Jimhis only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.