The Mayor of Casterbridge

Drunk and furious at a country fair, the young hay trusser Michael Henchard auctions off his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a passing sailor named Newson for five guineas, then wakes sober enough to swear off drink for twenty one years in penance. The oath holds, and Henchard rebuilds himself from nothing into a prosperous grain merchant and the mayor of Casterbridge, a self made man whose temper and pride never quite finish burying the guilt underneath. Susan returns years later, believing herself widowed once Newson is reported lost at sea, and Henchard remarries her to make things right, only to learn from her deathbed letter that the daughter he thought was his, Elizabeth Jane, actually died in infancy and this one is Newson's child, born after the sale. Donald Farfrae, a bright young Scottish corn factor, arrives in town and becomes Henchard's trusted manager before the older man's jealousy turns him into a bitter rival, a rivalry sharpened further when Farfrae marries Lucetta, a woman from Henchard's own past whom Henchard had once hoped to marry himself. Lucetta dies of shock after Henchard's old letters expose her earlier relationship with him to public ridicule, and Henchard's business and standing collapse completely soon after. When Newson turns up alive after all, Henchard cannot bear to face him and walks out of Casterbridge for good; Elizabeth Jane and Farfrae, now married themselves, track him down too late and find him already dead, his last written wish that no one mourn him or mark his grave.

Hardy structures the whole novel as a slow, deliberate reversal, Henchard's rise in the opening chapters mirrored exactly by his fall in the closing ones, and the effect reads less like bad luck accumulating than like a man's own character working itself out to its logical end. It is a demanding book in its way, dense with the machinery of grain trading and small town reputation, but Henchard himself, generous and cruel by turns, impossible to fully like or fully dismiss, carries a reader through it.

Hardy later said this was the one of his tragedies that made him weep while writing it, and he based the opening wife sale on a documented practice, including an 1806 Huddersfield case where a wife sold for as little as half a guinea.