The Mayor of Casterbridge

Author Thomas Hardy

Cover Design or Artwork by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Introduction by Keith Wilson

Edited by Keith Wilson

Notes by Keith Wilson

Series Penguin Clothbound Classics

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Thomas Hardy's haunting study of guilt and lost love, now in a beautiful new hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith

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," The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard, is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the…

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November 13, 2018

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Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840. In his writing, he immortalized the site of his birth—Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester, England. Delicate as a child, he was taught at home by his mother before he attended grammar school. At 16, 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…