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  • Published: 1 January 1981
  • ISBN: 9780553210248
  • Imprint: Bantam Dell
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $17.99

The Mayor of Casterbridge




Penguin Classics relaunch.

From its spectacular opening–the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county 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 build 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 suffer 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.

  • Published: 1 January 1981
  • ISBN: 9780553210248
  • Imprint: Bantam Dell
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $17.99

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Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 and became an apprentice architect at the age of sixteen. He spent his twenties in London, where he wrote his first poems. In 1867 Hardy returned to his native Dorset, whose rugged landscape was a great source of inspiration for his writing. Between 1871 and 1897 he wrote fourteen novels, including Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. This final work was received savagely; thereafter Hardy turned away from novels and spent the last thirty year of his life focusing on poetry. He died in 1928.

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Praise for The Mayor of Casterbridge

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