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 selfdestructive 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.