Publisher's Synopsis
When Michael Henchard, a young laborer who gets drunk at a fair, impulsively auctions off his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor, he creates a dark secret that will come back to dog him years later, when he has risen to become a successful and respected merchant and mayor of the city of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all come together in an utterly fluent way. A classically shaped tragedy, The Mayor of Casterbridge is an emblematic product of Hardy's maturity: vigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions
