Close Readings Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel.
Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England.
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Further reading and listening from the LRB:
Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death:
James Wood on Hardy’s life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures
Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts
Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.