The Mayor of Casterbridge (Oxford World's Classics)

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. 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. 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. From the stunning opening wife-selling scene (at one time a not uncommon phenomenon in England) to the final playing out his tragedy, Michael Henchard proves to be violent, selfish, greedy and crude. At the same time he possesses magnanimity, humility and a comparison that always pleased Hardy. This edition is a critically established text based on a detailed study of the manuscript of "The Mayor of Casterbridge", and of Hardy's revised printed versions. It includes an informative introduction by Dale Kramer, and annotations.