Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and
poet. This is Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply fl awed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town. In a fi t of drunken anger, Michael Henchard
sells his wife and baby daughter for fi ve 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 selfdestructive pride and temper.