The Return of the Native

In Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for “music, poetry, passion, war.” She marries Clym Yeobright, a native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness. Early readers responded to Hardy’s “insatiably observant” descriptions of the heath, a setting that for D. H. Lawrence provided the “real stuff of tragedy.” For modern readers, the tension between the mythic setting of the heath and the modernity of the characters challenges our freedom to shape the world as we wish; like Eustacia, we may not always be able to live our dreams.

This edition has the only critical text based on the manuscript and first edition, and without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions. The new introduction by critic Margaret R. Higonnet is the most critically up-to-date discussion of the novel available and considers the mythic nature of the heath opposed to the modernity of the characters, the economic vocabulary of value and investment, the novel’s classical structure, and Hardy’s cinematic techniques.