num_pages: 438
description: 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 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 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."
language: English
title: The Mayor of Casterbridge
titlecomplete: The Mayor of Casterbridge
characters: Elizabeth-Jane Newson, Donald Farfrae, Susan Henchard, Richard Newson, Michael Henchard, Lucetta Templeman
genres: Fiction, British Literature, Classic Literature, Literature, Classics, Novels, 19th Century, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Victorian
ratings_count: 61221
places: Wessex, England, Dorset, England, United Kingdom
publisher: Penguin Books