Recommendations
Books Like The Mayor of Casterbridge
Best books to read after The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy's most Shakespearean novel — a man who sells his wife while drunk and spends his life trying to recover from it, succeeding at everything and losing everything again. If the novel's tragic structure and Hardy's Wessex landscape moved you, these books share its portrait of character as destiny and the forces that destroy men who can almost, but not quite, redeem themselves.
- 1Buy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most famous and polemical novel — a young country woman destroyed by the society that refuses to let her be 'pure' after what was done to her; the most direct companion to The Mayor of Casterbridge in its portrait of a Hardy protagonist destroyed by the gap between their inner nature and the social world's expectations, but presenting the tragedy from a woman's perspective and with an explicit feminist argument
- 2Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most romantic and accessible novel — the independent Bathsheba Everdene and the three men who love her; the most hopeful of the major novels and the best entry point to Hardy's Wessex world; reading it before The Mayor of Casterbridge gives the clearest picture of what Hardy's pastoral vision promises before the later novels darken it
- 3Buy
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
The play Hardy most clearly had in mind when constructing Henchard — a powerful man who destroys his power through a failure of wisdom and emotional control, whose decline is partly the result of his character and partly the result of people who exploit his weaknesses; the tragic-fall structure of The Mayor of Casterbridge is modeled on Shakespeare, and the parallel is most clear in Lear
- 4Buy
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's novel about a woman who chooses love over social convention and is destroyed — the European parallel to Hardy's portrait of protagonists undone by their own passionate natures in collision with inflexible social structures; where Hardy's protagonists are typically destroyed by the gap between their social position and their inner life, Tolstoy's Anna is destroyed by the gap between her emotional nature and the social world's requirements
- 5Buy
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne's Puritan romance about a woman condemned by her community for adultery and the man who cannot acknowledge his role — the American counterpart to Hardy's portrait of a person destroyed by an error that society refuses to forgive; both novels are about what communities do to people who have transgressed and cannot escape the community's memory
- 6Buy
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's novel about a man who commits a murder and cannot bear the psychological consequences — the most psychologically intense European parallel to The Mayor of Casterbridge in its portrait of a man who acts decisively and disastrously and then must live with what he has done; where Hardy's Henchard is destroyed by external consequences, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is destroyed by internal ones
- 7Buy
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's final novel — his darkest and most explicitly critical of Victorian institutions; while The Mayor of Casterbridge is a classical tragedy of a man brought down by his character flaws, Jude is an indictment of the social system that makes aspiration fatal; reading both together gives the fullest picture of Hardy's tragic vision
- 8Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
George Eliot's masterpiece about frustrated ambition in a provincial English town — the most sympathetic and nuanced portrait of people who want more than their social world will give them in Victorian fiction; where Hardy's protagonists are destroyed by their world, Eliot's survive (or don't) in ways that feel more psychologically realistic and less structurally predetermined
More The Mayor of Casterbridge Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.