Year of Publication: 1886
Length: 310 pages
Genre: Fiction
"The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?"
Unemployed farmworker Michael Henchard gets drunk at a country fair and impulsively sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter to the highest bidder. Eighteen years later, Susan and her daughter, Elizabeth Jane, track Henchard down, only to find that he is the richest and most powerful man in the town of Casterbridge. Henchard is keen to make amends, but his attempts to make things right, coupled with his unchanged impulsiveness, lead to tragic consequences.
Like the other Thomas Hardy novels, this is set in his fictional county of Wessex in the south-west of England. It';s a beautifully written novel, with a real feeling for the rhythms of life among the rural poor and has a real sense of time and place. The story is packed with incident, the story was originally serialised, and Hardy himself felt that too much stuff happens in the story, due to the need to provide incidents for each instalment. The book works with it's powerful characters, particularly with the antihero Michael Henchard, who does a lot of really horrible things, but is almost redeemed due to the fact that he destroys himself and everything around him, but there is humanity there. Henchard is his own worse enemy. Things look up for the other characters in the novel when they dissociate themselves form Henchard, and he torpedoes every chance for happiness that he has, due to his pride, jealousy and greed. For a classic novel, this is a real page-turner, if ultimately deeply tragic.
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