Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, gets drunk at a country fair and auctions off his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a passing sailor named Newson. Sober and horrified, Henchard swears off alcohol for twenty-one years and rebuilds himself as the prosperous Mayor of Casterbridge. Eighteen years later, Susan returns with Elizabeth-Jane, believing Newson dead. Henchard remarries Susan, but his past keeps surfacing: his former lover Lucetta arrives, a brilliant young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae becomes his rival in business and love, and Henchard discovers Elizabeth-Jane is actually Newson's daughter. As Henchard's pride drives away everyone who might save him, Farfrae rises to replace him as both mayor and husband to Lucetta. Susan dies, Lucetta dies after a public shaming, Newson returns alive, and Henchard — broken, alone, and stripped of everything — wanders off to die in a hovel on Egdon Heath, leaving a will that asks the world to forget he ever existed.

At a country fair in Weydon-Priors, a young itinerant hay-trusser named Michael Henchard drinks too much furmity — a grain-based porridge laced with rum — and, in a fit of drunken resentment, auctions off his wife Susan and their infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a sailor named Richard Newson for fi...