The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy(1878)
Novelc. 380 pages
“A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”
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One great work, every day
by Thomas Hardy(1878)
“A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.”
Thomas Hardy(1878)
Egdon Heath dominates this novel like a character, dark and indifferent, outlasting every human passion played out upon it. Eustacia Vye dreams of Paris while trapped in the furze and bracken; Clym Yeobright returns from the city believing he can improve the world. Hardy wrote this as his fourth novel, and the heath's brooding presence established the Wessex landscape that would define his fiction. The plotting is almost Greek in its machinery of fate and missed connections. The bonfire scenes glow against the darkness. Hardy shows us people destroying themselves against a landscape that will forget them entirely.