From its spectacular opening-the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair-to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy\'s finest and most powerful novels.
With Tess, Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the "infidelity" and "obscenity" of this great novel he had subtitled "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented." Jude the Obscure aroused ev.
There he had wrote The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d\'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).
Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1878, and in 1885 they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life.
In 1874, Far from the Maddening Crowd, published serially and anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, became a great success.
In 1867-68, his first novel was refused publication, but Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), his first Wessex novel, did well enough to convince him to continue writing.
During his time he began seriously to write poetry, which remained his first literary love and his last.
As a youth he trained as an architect and in 1862 obtained a post in London.
About the Author: Thomas Hardy, whose writing immortalized the Wessex countryside and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, was born at Upper Bockhampton, near Stinsford in Dorset in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonemason.
Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, "Hardy\'s Lord Jim...his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.
Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story build into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power-only to suffer a most bitter downfall.
From its spectacular opening-the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair-to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy\'s finest and most powerful novels
