The Mayor of Casterbridge Introduction by Craig Raine

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all came together in an utterly fluent way inThe Mayor of Casterbridge. A classically shaped story about the rise and fall of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard in the harsh world of nineteenth-century rural England,The Mayor of Casterbridgeis an emblematic product of Hardy's maturityvigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions.

J.I.M. Stewart (1906–1994) was the author of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography; Character and Motive in Shakespeare and Eight Modern Writers, among other works.


From the Trade Paperback edition.