The Mayor of Casterbridge

At a country fair, a hay-trusser drinks rum laced secretly into his furmity and, before the bowl is empty, auctions his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas, sealed with a handshake while the tent laughs along. Thomas Hardy spends the rest of the novel making Michael Henchard answer for that one drunken hour: sober now, he swears off drink for twenty-one years and builds himself, from nothing, into the grain-trading Mayor of Casterbridge, right up until the wife he sold walks back into town with the past close behind her. What makes it unbearable is how little cruelty it actually took, one bad hour, wholly undone and wholly irreversible. Hardy calls him 'a man of character' without irony: generous and vengeful in the same breath, incapable of the small lie that might have saved him. The last chapters read like a man quietly erasing his own name, and the final page asks you to grant him the one mercy he was too proud to ask for himself.