Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor Nigel Anthony.
Here - I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five 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 self-destructive pride and temper.
Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.
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"A magnificent novel. Very engaging. This is Thomas Hardy at his best - a story brilliantly crafted and told, filled with pathos. The story centers on Michael Henchard, an English common laborer (hay-trusser) who, alternatingly, is at one moment good and noble and at the next evil and reprehensible. While Hardy paints him more as a dark-hearted being, in the universal sense he is "everyman." We all have a tendency to alternate between episodes of good and bad. Early in the novel, Henchard commits a dastardly deed (in a fit of drunkenness, he sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor at a county fair). He feels guilt and amends his ways (he tries to find them and can't; so he faithfully forsakes drink for 20 years), but he never seems able to root out his innate pride and thus is never able to redeem himself. His last will and testatment, written by his own hand, is heart-wrenching. Some of those about him are blessed, but many suffer at his hand. The heroine, Elizabeth Jane, is one of these brought to suffer. In the summing up, Hardy says of her, "the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable. . . [which] thus handled, have much of the same inspriting effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced." Finally, Hardy says, speaking of her [and of the human experience generally], "And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity (sic) had been accorded in the adult state was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." In other words, joy (when it occurs) springs out of adversity, struggle and pain. The novel is brilliantly written - this is English language at its best. I highly recommend this book to every reader. It is one of my favorites. Also, BBC did a wonderful film adaptation of the book, which I believe is as compelling as the book."
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Craig (5 out of 5 stars)