The Mayor of Casterbridge (Penguin Clothbound Classics)

li, [1], 393 pp. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Keith Wilson. "Thomas Hardy, (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain, critical posterity regards him among the most important English novelists. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's novel A Pair of Blue Eyes. In this novel Henry Knight, one of his protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff. The story, serialized in Tinsley's Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873, became the archetypal - and literal - cliff-hanger of Victorian prose."