The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics)

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Classics)

by Thomas Hardy (Author), Thomas Hardy (Author), Keith Wilson (Editor), Keith Wilson (Editor)

Synopsis

A haunting study of guilt and lost love in Penguin Classics, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is edited with an introduction and notes by Keith Wilson. 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', Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town. This edition includes an introduction, chronology of Hardy's life and works, the illustrations for the original serial issue, place names, maps, glossary, full explanatory notes as well as Hardy's prefaces to the 1895 and 1912 editions. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), born Higher Brockhampton, near Dorchester, originally trained as an architect before earning his living as a writer. Though he saw himself primarily as a poet, Hardy was the author of some of the late eighteenth century's major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts. If you enjoyed The Mayor of Casterbridge, you might like George Eliot's Silas Marner, also available in Penguin Classics. 'The greatest tragic writer among the English novelists' Virginia Woolf 'Visceral, passionate, anti-hypocrisy, anti-repression ...Hardy reaches into our wildest recesses' Evening Standard

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Quantity

5 in stock

More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published:

ISBN 10: 0141439785
ISBN 13: 9780141439785

Media Reviews
Hardy's world is a world that can never disappear. --Margaret Drabble
Author Bio
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and wrote both poetry and novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. He died in 1928. Keith Wilson is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa and has edited Hardy's Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories for Penguin Classics.