One great work, every day
by Thomas Hardy(1886)
“One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors.”
Thomas Hardy(1886)
A man gets drunk, sells his wife and daughter at a fair, and spends the rest of his life trying to become worthy of them. Hardy based this on actual wife-sales in rural England, and the novel traces Henchard's rise to mayor and his inexorable fall. The plot is melodramatic; the psychology is exact. Henchard's character is his fate; he cannot stop destroying what he builds. Hardy's Wessex landscape is present but less dominant than in his other novels. The last image, of Henchard's will, forbidding anyone to remember him, is devastating. He wanted too much. He got exactly what he deserved.