One of the most conspicuous narrative blanks or silence, of the corpus of Thomas Hardy’s works is to be found in The Mayor of Casterbridge: a span of 18 years, following the notoriously dramatic episode in which Michael Henchard sells his wife in a drunken stupor at the Weydon-Priors fair. What seems interesting is that this conspicuous silence makes some other problematics of narrative silence in the novel unnoticeable. My purpose is to elucidate the meaning of this narrative silence or reticence by focusing on Elizabeth-Jane’s birth. Overlooking her illegitimacy would lead to a total misreading of the narrative silence about Elizabeth-Jane, and also of the subversive nature of this text.