Thomas Hardy 
Mayor of Casterbridge 

With an essay by Robert Langbaum.’Here – I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?’In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper.The Penguin English Library – 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.