The Return Of The Native Hardcover – 20 December 2022
Thomas Hardy . Peacock Books . English
The Return of the Native, both powerful and sombre, is considered to be the most representative of Hardy’s novels. It is set in Egdon Heath whose lowering, titanic presence dominates the men and women who live on it, and whose menace and beauty Hardy so surely and superbly evokes. The novel tells the story of Eustacia Vye, Thomasin and Mistress Yeobright, and the men who influence and alter their lives—Diggory Venn, a reddleman, Damon Wildeve and returning ‘native’, Clym Yeobright. The passionate Eustacia Vye feels herself imprisoned in the wild, isolated Egdon Heath, and her desire in life is ‘to be loved to madness’. Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant in Paris, disgusted with the worthlessness of his occupation, returns to Egdon intending to become a school-master in his native Heath. He falls in love with Eustacia, and she marries him, hoping to induce him to return to the exciting life of Paris. But Clym’s sight fails and he is reduced to furze-cutting for a livelihood, a catastrophe that drives her to despair....
Categories: Action & Adventure
About the Author
Thomas Hardy was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, on 2 June 1840. He was educated locally and at sixteen was articled to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London and found employment with another architect, Arthur Blomfield. He now began to write poetry and published an essay. By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks's assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts. After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy's finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset. Photo by Bain News Service, publisher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
