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, 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 a critically established text based on the manuscript and first edition.