(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all came together in an utterly fluent way in <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i>. A classically shaped story about the rise and fall of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard in the harsh world of nineteenth-century rural England, <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> is an emblematic product of Hardy's maturity–vigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions.