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He sold his wife at a fair, and spent the rest of his life paying for it.
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About this edition
The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character, Thomas Hardy’s great tragedy of pride, guilt, and the long reach of one irrevocable act, in a new Northlume Library edition.
At a country fair, a young hay-trusser named Michael Henchard, drunk, restless, and bitter, sells his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas. Waking to what he has done, he swears off drink for twenty years and sets out to remake himself. Eighteen years on he is the prosperous, respected Mayor of Casterbridge, until the wife he wronged walks quietly back into his life, and the buried past begins, piece by piece, to undo everything he has built.
First published in 1886, The Mayor of Casterbridge is among the most powerful of Hardy’s Wessex novels: a stark, compassionate study of a proud man broken by his own nature and the turnings of chance, set against the fields and market-town streets of a vanishing rural England.
This Northlume Library edition presents Hardy’s complete 1886 text, freshly typeset in EB Garamond and Marcellus, behind an original mixed media illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.
Details
- Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
- Northlume Classic Library
- Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 328 pages