The Mayor of Casterbridge

From its spectacular openingthe astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fairto 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 poweronly 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.

<b>J.I.M. Stewart</b> (1906–1994) was the author of <i>Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography; Character and Motive in Shakespeare</i> and <i>Eight Modern Writers</i>, among other works.<br><br><br><i>From the Trade Paperback edition.</i>