MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE（ISBN=9780679420354）

　　(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all came together in an utterly fluent way in "The Mayor of Casterbridge." A classically shaped story about the rise and fall of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard in the harsh world of nineteenth-century rural England, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" is an emblematic product of Hardy's maturity-vigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions.

　　Thomas Hardy, whose writings immortalized the Wessex country side and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, was born near Egdon Heath Dorset in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonesmason. As a youth he trained as an architect in 1862 obtained a post in London. During this time he began seriously to write poetry, which remained his first literary love and his last. In 1867-68, his fist novel was refused publication, but Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), his first Essex novel, did well enough for him to continue writing. In 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd, published serially and anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, became a great success. Hardy married Emma Gifford in1874, and in 1855, they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life. There he wrote The Return of the Native (1878) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). With Tess Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the “infidelity” and “obscenity” of this great novel he had subtitled “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.” Jude the Obscure aroused even greater indignation and was denounced as pornography. Hardy’s disgust at the reaction to Jude led him to announce in 1896 that he would never write fiction again. He published the Wessex Poems in 1898, Poems of the Past and Present in 1901, and from 1903 to 1908, The Dynasts, a huge drama in which Hardy’s conception of the Immanent Will, implicit in the tragic novels, in most clearly stated. In 1912, Hardy’s wife Emma died. The marriage was childless and had long been a troubled one, but in the years after her death, Hardy memorialized her in several poems. At 74, he married his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale, herself a writer of children’s books and articles, with whom he lived happily until his death in 1928. His heart was buried in the Wessex countryside; his ashes were placed next to Charles Dickens’s in the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey.