Public reader discussion about The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
By RedBright
Thanks for the recommendation! I really liked Ciaran Hinds in Persuasion, so I’m definitely going to check this out, even though it feels like it might be way more intense and painfully dramatic than Austen. The stills look awesome though, and whoever that actress is in slide 13—her eyebrows are so very early-2000s 😂
By HawkBirch2001
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (I rounded up to 5) One of my big reading goals for 2021 was finally filling in some “classic” gaps. Thomas Hardy was honestly pretty low on my list…until I stumbled on some random online summary of the first chapter of *The Mayor of Casterbridge*. The whole setup—this guy selling his wife and daughter and then everything that follows—sounded so absurd I couldn’t not try it. I figured I’d like it, sure, but I didn’t expect to end up loving it as much as I did. The plot is definitely over-the-top at times, and Hardy goes in on melodrama, but somehow it doesn’t feel random. Even when the stuff is wild, the reactions and consequences feel like they actually make sense. The pacing also felt kind of more “modern” to me than what I was expecting from something labeled Victorian. His writing is kind of formal and can get wordy, but once I found the rhythm, it’s honestly beautiful. Also, I liked that you can have people who are bitter and kind of desperate living in this lovely, idyllic-looking place like Casterbridge and the countryside around it. What really pulled me in, though, was the cast. Henchard, Susan, and Elizabeth-Jane basically felt like they jumped off the page right from the beginning. And every new character had their own voice too. Henchard is fascinating in a way that’s almost painful—he can sort of be aware of himself sometimes, but emotionally he feels like a kid. He’s always stuck in this loop he made: he messes people over, realizes it, tries to fix things, then gets blindsided by his own feelings (usually jealousy or fear), and ends up hurting someone again. The man cannot get it together. Elizabeth-Jane (EJ) felt the most tragic to me. A lot of the people around her think she’s slow or dim, but I kept feeling like she was actually the sharpest and most observant among the main group. She’s also the only one who genuinely tries to improve herself, even though she has basically no real control over her life. And she’s the only one who gets dragged into the scandals in Casterbridge, not because she did anything, but mostly just because of where she was born—into a messy situation. I do think Hardy is making some kind of point about women in Victorian society, but I also get the feeling he’s still working within what his era allowed. So EJ doesn’t fully turn into the heroine I wanted her to be. Still, that kind of makes the tragedy hit harder, because it feels believable for the world the book puts her in. By the end, it’s pretty clear Hardy keeps pushing the idea that secrets don’t stay buried forever—and that wrongdoing done “in the dark” will eventually show up. Time feels like a huge deal here too, like it’s practically a character. It’s like Time is yanking the strings of everyone and messing with them, and you can watch characters panic as their secrets get uncovered. I had fun spotting the references to Time—sometimes they’re obvious, sometimes they’re a little more subtle. This is my first Hardy, so I don’t really have anything else to compare it to, but I can say for sure I’ll be reading more of him soon—I just have to figure out which one to pick next.