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. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of
Character’, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply
flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out
against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.