The Mayor of Casterbridge Reading Order

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy is the most Shakespearean of Hardy's novels — a tragedy of a man destroyed by his own character flaws as much as by the indifferent social forces that Hardy usually foregrounds. Michael Henchard, the hay-trusser who sells his wife and daughter at a drunken fair and spends the rest of the novel attempting to recover the respectability he has thrown away, is Hardy's most compelling male protagonist: driven by pride, capable of genuine generosity, undone by a jealousy and impulsiveness that reassert themselves precisely when he has most nearly achieved rehabilitation. The novel is set in the fictional Casterbridge (based on Dorchester) and is the Hardy novel most focused on a single character rather than on a doomed love triangle, making it both the most accessible entry point for new Hardy readers and the most satisfying for readers who want to see Hardy's dark determinism applied to a figure who might be called tragic in the classical sense.