Thomas Hardy opens The Return of the Native not with a person but with a place — a whole first chapter devoted to Egdon Heath, the wild, dark, ancient moorland that broods over the entire novel. It is the boldest stroke in all of Hardy’s Wessex: the landscape itself is the true protagonist, and everyone who lives on it is shaped, and doomed, by its indifferent power.
Against the heath, Hardy sets one of his most memorable heroines — Eustacia Vye, a passionate, restless woman who burns to escape the moor for the glamour of the wider world, and destroys herself and others in the trying. She marries the ‘native’ who has returned, Clym, expecting he will carry her away to Paris; when he chooses instead to stay and serve the heath she despises, the collision of their desires becomes tragedy. Eustacia is one of literature’s great studies of a woman too large for the life available to her.
Hardy’s vision is at its starkest here: human passion, however fierce, is small against the endless, uncaring land, which was here before us and will outlast us all. The heath does not hate Eustacia. It simply does not care — and that is worse.
This edition gathers it among Hardy’s five major novels.
Read Thomas Hardy: Five Major Novels →
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