The Mayor of Casterbridge
1886
At a country fair in 1800s England, a man sells his wife and infant daughter for five guineas. Then sobers up. That single night of drunken shame becomes the wound that never heals. Michael Henchard rises from that nadir to become the respected mayor of Casterbridge, where his word is law and his prosperity is the talk of the county. But respectability built on a forgotten sin is a house of cards. When his past resurfaces, when his daughter returns, when his old temper and pride flare, the man who climbed so high discovers how fast he can fall. Hardy subtitles this 'A Story of a Man of Character' - and the irony cuts deep. Henchard has character in abundance: stubborn will, fierce pride, capacity for genuine feeling. But these same traits, unchecked, become the instruments of his destruction. This is Hardy at his unsentimental best, anatomizing a man who cannot escape himself, and the small-town hypocrisy that both elevates and destroys him. It is a tragedy of immense power, as relevant now as it was in 1886.
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“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.””
— Thomas Hardy
“I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Some folks want their luck buttered.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.””
— Thomas Hardy
“She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.””
— Thomas Hardy
“She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play””
— Thomas Hardy
“Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.””
— Thomas Hardy
“She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.””
— Thomas Hardy
“It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.””
— Thomas Hardy
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Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-mayor-of-casterbridge-d28ab28e-2547-4bef-a702-cd06b1f4fa6b.Hardy, T. (1886). The Mayor of Casterbridge. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-mayor-of-casterbridge-d28ab28e-2547-4bef-a702-cd06b1f4fa6bHardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-mayor-of-casterbridge-d28ab28e-2547-4bef-a702-cd06b1f4fa6b.
