Set against the backdrop of peaceful south-west England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives.
Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable to survive in the new commercial world, his story is also a journey towards love.
This edition is the only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy's extensive revisions.
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In this compelling tale of love and deceit, Hardy depicts a society in which women are punished for their indiscretions rather than rewarded for their capacity to love. When Elfride Swancourt meets Stephen Smith, she is attracted not only to his handsome face and gentle bearing but also to the sense of mystery which surrounds him. Distressed to find that the mystery consists only in the humbleness of his origins, she nonetheless remains true to their youthful vows. But societal pressures, combined with the advent of the intellectually superior Henry Knight, eventually displace her affections. Knight, however, proves to be an uncompromising moralist who, obsessed with fears about Elfride's sexual past, destroys her happiness.

In writing of this poignant struggle between classes and sexes, Hardy drew heavily on his own relationships with his family, fiancée, and closest friend. In the Introduction to this new edition, Pamela Dalziel discovers fascinating parallels between Hardy's life and his art, and probes the paradoxes lying behind his portrayal of these complex characters and the society which shapes them.

Thomas Hardy's "Poetical Matter" notebook, the last to be published from among the small group of notebooks not destroyed by Hardy himself or by his executors, has now been meticulously edited with full scholarly annotation. Through its inclusion of so many notes copied by Hardy from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, "Poetical Matter" reaches back to all periods of his life, and is especially valuable from a biographical standpoint for its expansion and enhancement of knowledge of Hardy's final years and for its preservation of such intimate records as his richly revealing memories of the Bockhampton of his childhood and his sexually charged impressions of a woman glimpsed during a trip on a pleasure steamer in 1868. Its special distinctiveness nevertheless lies in its uniqueness as a late working notebook devoted specifically to verse. Florence Hardy, Hardy's widow, recalled his having experienced a great outburst of late creativity, feeling that he could go on writing almost indefinitely, and "Poetical Matter" bears direct witness to his actively thinking about poetry and projecting and composing new poems until shortly before his death at the age of eighty-seven. As such, it contains an abundance of new ideas for poems and sequences of poems and demonstrates Hardy's characteristic creative progression, his working variously with initial ideas, with gathered notes, whether old or new, and with tentative prose formulations, verse fragments, metrical schemes, and rhyme patterns, towards the writing of the drafts from which, yet further worked and reworked, the completed poem would ultimately emerge.

Thomas Hardy's Studies, Specimens &c. notebook stands almost alone as a witness to his exertions and aspirations of the 1860s, when he was already in his middle twenties but still working in London as an architectual assistant and only tentatively feeling his way towards as yet dimly glimpsed possibilities of literary expression and employment. Because so little documentation of any kind has survived for this early period of his life and work, the notebook is of extraordinary interest as containing detailed evidence of the untutored deliberateness with which Hardy was seeking to provide himself with a poetic background, educate himself in poetic techniques, and initiate a process from which he could perhaps emerge as a practising, even a publishing, poet. In private hands until very recently, and seen by only a very few scholars, Studies, Specimens &c.' dates from 1865-68, is entirely in Hardy's own hand, and consists of eighty-eight closely written pages of working memoranda, and quotations from other poets - mostly extracts a few words long in which underlining has been used to highlight individual images and word-usages. Although no drafts of actual poems are present, there are numerous instances of Hardy's seeking to generate a poetic, and sometimes erotic, language and imagery out of materials (e.g., an architectual textbook) apparently chosen precisley for their recalcitrance to such treatment. The edition itself seeks to reproduce typographically all essential features of the original document. The introductory material describes the notebook bibliographically, sets it in its biographical context, and discusses some of its more important technical features. Included in the extensive apparatus are textual notes, explications of Hardy's occasional quotations - indicating, in most instances, the editions or actual volumes he certainly or probably used. Explanatory notes are provided for - among other things - some erased but now partly recoved memoranda of Hardy's that appear to have significant biographical implications.

Included in this edition are ten stories, varying in length from sketch to novella, which were never collected into volumes during Hardy's lifetime. Some contained references to actual people, or plot elements that he reused elsewhere; others, such as his only stories for children, were simply too different from his other work in the short-story form; the longest, `An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress', was apparently left uncollected to allow for a possible reconstruction of the `lost' novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, from which it was drawn. The three final stories resulted from literary collaborations which were also emotional involvements, with Florence Henniker in `The Spectre of the Real', and with Florence Dugdale, later the second Mrs Hardy, in `Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer' and `The Unconquerable' (now published for the first time). Although all of these stories occupy significant positions within Hardy's career as a writer of fiction - extending that career, indeed, both earlier and later than the standard account would allow - none of them has previously received serious editorial treatment. For the most part they have also been ignored or lightly passed over by critics and biographers, and such discussion as they have aroused has frequently been based on false assumptions. This edition remedies some of these deficiencies in Hardy scholarship, both in its historical introductions and in its critically edited texts, which are based on full collations of all editions published before Hardy's death and all surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs (many of which have gone almost entirely unexamined in the past). Complete lists of the variants in these pre-publication witnesses and in all authorially authorized printings supplement the edited texts.