The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
'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.
