The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy (1878)
“A wild heath, a woman who wants to escape it, a man who chose to return to it — and the landscape that destroys everyone who refuses to accept its terms.”
Short Summary
On the vast, dark expanse of Egdon Heath, Eustacia Vye — beautiful, restless, and desperate to escape rural life — marries Clym Yeobright, a young man who has returned from Paris to become a schoolteacher among the heath folk. Their marriage collapses when Clym's eyesight fails and he becomes a furze-cutter, the very kind of rustic laborer Eustacia married him to escape. Clym's mother, Mrs. Yeobright, dies on the heath after being turned away from Clym's door — Eustacia refused to let her in. Damon Wildeve, the man Eustacia should never have given up, lingers as a temptation. When all paths close, Eustacia drowns in a weir during a storm. Wildeve drowns trying to save her. Clym survives, consumed by guilt, and becomes an itinerant preacher on the heath he never left.
Detailed Summary
Egdon Heath dominates the novel before any character appears. Hardy devotes his entire first chapter to describing this 'vast tract of unenclosed wild' — a prehistoric landscape that resists human cultivation, swallows human ambition, and operates on a timescale that makes human lives insignificant....