The Return of the Native

One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fianc , Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life.

As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 02/13/2001
ISBN: 9780375757181
Pages: 448
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.14h x 5.01w x 0.99d
Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 5996 / Return of the Native
Reading Level: 10.2 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 42