Book description
With an essay by Robert Langbaum.
'Here - I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman
is no good to me. Who'll have her?'
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.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Formerly a prize-winning architectural student, Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928) went on to become a prolific novelist and poet. The
Mayor of Casterbridge is a powerful and sympathetic
psychological study of a heroic but flawed man, set against the
compellingly vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.
Hardy's novels Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the
Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a
Tower,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are also
published in the Penguin English Library.
