Reading Order
Mayor of CasterbridgeThomas Hardy Wessex Novels Reading Order
Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is one of his most Shakespearean novels — a study in self-destruction organized around Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who sells his wife and daughter while drunk at a fair and spends the rest of his life trying to recover from the consequences, becoming mayor of the Dorset town of Casterbridge only to be progressively destroyed by the return of his past. Hardy called it 'a story of a man of character.'
Where to start
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Complete Mayor of Casterbridge Book List
- 1Buy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy·1886·The novel — originally serialized in The Graphic (1884–85) with some content removed for the family magazine; the most concentrated of Hardy's tragic plots and the one most directly organized around a single protagonist's descent; the wife-selling opening is one of the most powerful beginnings in Victorian fiction. - 2Buy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy·1891·Hardy's most famous novel and the one most directly engaged with questions of sexual and social injustice; reads as a companion to Mayor in its portrait of a protagonist destroyed by the social order, but the protagonist is a woman, which makes the injustice more explicit and Hardy's argument more directly polemical. - 3Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy·1874·Hardy's most romantic and accessible novel — the best entry point to his Wessex world and his most hopeful conclusion; shows the Wessex that The Mayor of Casterbridge darkens. - 4Buy
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy·1895·Hardy's final novel — his darkest and most explicitly critical of Victorian institutions; where 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 those flaws fatal. - 5Buy
King Lear
William Shakespeare·1606·The play Hardy most clearly had in mind in constructing Henchard — a powerful man who destroys his own power through a failure of wisdom and emotional control, whose decline is partly the result of his own character and partly the result of people who exploit his weaknesses; reading the play alongside the novel illuminates Hardy's conscious use of the tragic-fall structure. - 6Buy
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne·1850·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 fundamentally about what communities do to people who have transgressed and cannot escape the community's memory. - 7Buy
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot·1860·Eliot's novel about Maggie Tulliver — whose passionate nature leads to catastrophe in a community that will not forgive deviation from its norms; shares The Mayor of Casterbridge's portrait of a character destroyed by the gap between their inner nature and the social world's expectations.
Mayor of Casterbridge — Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Henchard sell his wife and daughter?
The wife-selling occurs in the novel's opening chapter when Henchard is drunk at a country fair and sells his wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor named Newson for five guineas. The scene is presented not as a joke but as a genuine transaction; Hardy based it on actual incidents of wife-selling in the English countryside, which were an extralegal form of divorce practiced by the poor who could not afford legal dissolution of marriage. Henchard takes an oath the next morning not to drink for twenty years and spends the rest of the novel's timeline (roughly 18 years) trying to recover his family and his self-respect. The sale is both a moral catastrophe (which Henchard recognizes immediately on sobering up) and the founding trauma of the novel's plot: everything that happens to Henchard subsequently is a consequence of that one drunken evening.
Is The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy's best novel?
Hardy himself called Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure his most important works in terms of argument. Critics have divided between seeing Tess as his greatest achievement (for its polemical power and the character of Tess) and Jude (for its formal ambition and its most explicit social criticism). The Mayor of Casterbridge is less politically engaged than either but is generally considered the most purely novelistic — the most completely organized as a tragedy with a hero rather than as an argument, and the most Shakespearean in its conception of character and fate. It is the Hardy novel most recommended for readers who respond to the tragic-fall structure of King Lear or Macbeth rather than the social-protest dimension of the later novels.
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.