Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Mayor of Casterbridge

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Peter Joyce

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    In a fit of drunken bitterness a young hay trusser, Michael Henchard, sells his wife Susan to Mr Newson, a sailor, at a country fair. The transaction also includes their daughter Elizabeth Jane. When sober the next day, he regrets his action but looks for them in vain and is eventually told they may have emigrated. Eighteen years later Henchard is the Mayor of Casterbridge and the people of the town believe him to be a widower. In recent times he has had an affair with a young woman in Jersey, Lucetta, while travelling there on business. She inherits a fortune and comes to Casterbridge to persuade Henchard to make ‘an honest woman’ of her. However, Susan, having lost her husband at sea, returns with the now grown Elizabeth Jane. The Mayor, wishing to atone for his crime of years before, remarries her. To complicate matters further a young ambitious Scot, Donald Farfrae, has settled in the town at Henchards instigation. Despite their rapidly worsening business relationship Donald initially casts a glad eye at Elizabeth Jane but then falls in love with Lucetta. What follows will destroy Henchard and cause all the main protagonists an immeasurable amount of emotional pain as betrayal, death and fate play their part in a tale full of suspense.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAssembled Stories
    Release dateOct 1, 2015
    ISBN9781860153853
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.

    More audiobooks from Thomas Hardy

    Related to The Mayor of Casterbridge

    Related audiobooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Eight Hot Trollopes

      Jun 17, 2019

      An experiment for 21st-century readers: let’s take a quick tour of the love scenes of a famous Victorian novelist to see if his writings still enflame. The post Eight Hot Trollopes appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Kazuo Ishiguro And The Inescapable Perils Of The Internet

      Apr 18, 2018

      “I have this feeling, that all it will take will be one moment, even a tiny moment.” When Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature I was slightly disappointed. I was a “Harukist”—over the preceding eight months, I had been religiously reading

      8 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      Lucrezia’s Battle For Survival

      Sep 7, 2022

      Lucrezia’s Battle For Survival
      4 min read

    • Article

      THE BLACK SPIDER Part Two

      Oct 30, 2019

      THE BLACK SPIDER Part Two
      25 min read

    • Article

      HEALTH & WELL BEING

      Sep 23, 2022

      ‘I’m not really sure why I’m here, lying in a bin-bag on the side of a hill, but I’m strangely glad that I am,” writes Raynor Winn, part of the way through her latest walking odyssey with her husband, Moth. She won’t be the only one glad. With her pr

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lucrezia’s Battle For Survival

      Sep 7, 2022

      Lucrezia’s Battle For Survival
      4 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      “Properties of Thirst”

      Jul 5, 2022

      “Properties of Thirst”
      11 min read

    • Article

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses

      Jun 3, 2021

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses
      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      If I Had a Sense of Beauty

      Dec 5, 2017

      If I Had a Sense of Beauty
      14 min read

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Dec 1, 2021

      The light from the full moon lent a silky, glacial sheen to the towering front of the cloud, which stretched off to the horizon in both directions. I stood transfixed as it made its way down the street toward me at a little over the town’s speed limi

      3 min read

    • Article

      OreoArroyo

      Jul 6, 2021

      WHEN THE STRIPPER STRUTTED INTO THE LIBRARY, SHE COULDN’T hide her dismay. Probably, she and her bodyguard expected a bachelor party or investment bankers celebrating a big deal at the mansion overlooking the Newport Coast. She wouldn’t have anticipa

      21 min read

    • Article

      My Irish question

      Aug 21, 2022

      My Irish question
      11 min read

    • Article

      Afterglow

      May 14, 2020

      Afterglow
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Mayor of Casterbridge

    4.5/5

    15 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I saw parts of the movie years ago and the ending. I remember being so utterly gripped with a mixture of devastation and sadness by the little I saw. I don’t know why it took me so long to read the book. It did not disappoint. There within is Mr. Henchard; the most complicated character I’ve ever come across. One who is able to glance fully at himself and repent yet fall on the knife of his own making over and over. Remove the ego and the human hedge and turn to the almighty, you want to scream at him. I did scream at him. But the story is a reminder that we are all so flawed but capable of looking up and letting God.