The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
First published 1878 · English · 314 pages
- Novels
- Love and romance
- Travel
Set on the bleak and beautiful Egdon Heath, this novel follows Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a career in Paris hoping to improve life for local people. His return disturbs the quiet lives of his mother, his cousin Thomasin, and the restless Eustacia Vye, who longs to escape the heath. Love, ambition, and misunderstanding pull the characters in different directions. The heath itself is almost a character, and the book is celebrated for its atmosphere.
Quotes
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.
To be loved to madness—such was her great desire.
The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own.