Complete and unabridged, with 27 full-page plates by Marianne North, John Everett Millais and John Atkinson Grimshaw. A drunk sells his wife at a country fair, sobers up, swears off drink for twenty-one years and becomes mayor of the town - and then the wife he sold walks back into his life. Hardy took the wife-sale from newspaper reports, where it happened often enough to be a recognized custom, and built the most relentless of his plots on it. Twenty-seven plates by painters including Robert McGregor and Arthur Streeton follow the rural labor and town life of Hardy's Wessex across the nineteenth century.