The Return of the Native Summary: Hardy's Year on Egdon Heath
What The Return of the Native is about
Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel appeared in 1878, serialised across twelve monthly instalments in the magazine Belgravia between 9 January and 19 December. Hardy had trouble placing it. The themes were considered controversial, and Belgravia, a periodical with a taste for sensation, took it on. Reviews at the time were mixed but broadly positive. In the twentieth century the book settled into its present position as one of Hardy's most read and most highly regarded works.
The story unfolds entirely within the environs of Egdon Heath, a stretch of open Wessex country that Hardy treats almost as a character in its own right. Apart from a closing epilogue called Aftercourses, the action covers exactly a year and a day. It opens on the evening of Guy Fawkes Night, with bonfires lit on the surrounding hills and the old pagan spirit of the place showing through the Christian calendar.
The opening scene introduces Diggory Venn, a reddleman, crossing the heath with a van drawn by ponies. He sells reddle, the red ochre farmers use to mark their sheep, and the trade has stained him red from head to foot. In the van is Thomasin Yeobright. That day she was to have married Damon Wildeve, a local innkeeper, but an inconsistency in the marriage licence stopped the wedding. Distressed, she ran after Venn's van and asked him to take her home.
Home is Bloom's End, where her aunt, Mrs Yeobright, has previously forbidden the banns and now wants nothing more than the marriage safely done, since Thomasin has compromised herself by leaving town and coming back unwed. Wildeve, meanwhile, is still entangled with Eustacia Vye. When Mrs Yeobright's son Clym returns from Paris, where he has prospered as a diamond merchant, the arrangement of feeling on the heath shifts again. Clym is the native of the title.
The main characters
Eustacia Vye is the novel's centre of gravity. Black-haired and queenly, daughter of an Italian father from Corfu, she grew up in the fashionable seaside resort of Budmouth and lives now with her grandfather in a lonely house on the heath. She holds herself apart from the heathfolk, who think her an oddity and in some cases a witch. She loathes the heath yet walks it constantly, carrying a spyglass and an hourglass. She had been Wildeve's lover, and even at the height of that passion she understood that she loved him only because no better object was available.
Clym Yeobright has given up Paris and the diamond trade. He plans to become a schoolmaster for the rural poor. Eustacia reads him as her means of escape to a grander life abroad, which is almost exactly the opposite of what he intends. They meet, fall in love, and marry over his mother's objections, after quarrels with both his mother and Eustacia.
Thomasin is sweet-natured where Eustacia is imperious. Wildeve is fickle. Venn is shrewd, handsome and well-meaning under his colouring, in love with Thomasin, rejected by her two years earlier, and devoted enough to help her secure the man she has chosen instead. Mrs Yeobright is a good woman, proud and inflexible, and her pride does real damage.
The themes
Love here is nearly always a misreading. Eustacia loves what a man might represent rather than what he is. Clym loves a woman who wants him to be someone else. The marriages in the book are made on terms neither party has properly stated.
Class runs underneath all of it. Eustacia's dreams are of Paris and Budmouth, of a life with a wider horizon. Clym's ambition runs downwards, towards teaching the rural poor. When he strains his eyes with night study and takes temporary work as a furze-cutter, Eustacia finds herself in a hut on the heath, bound by marriage to a labouring man. Her dreams are blasted not by cruelty but by her husband's idea of a good life.
Then Wildeve inherits a large sum of money and becomes, suddenly, the man who could give her what she wanted. He calls at the cottage on a hot August day while Clym sleeps exhausted on the hearth, and Mrs Yeobright arrives at the door hoping to mend the estrangement with her son. Everything that follows turns on that afternoon.
Why it still matters
Hardy made the heath inescapable, and in doing so built a tragedy out of ordinary ambition. The characters want reasonable things. They want them at cross purposes, and the landscape offers no help. The novel also preserves a vanished working world, from reddlemen and furze-cutters to banns read in church and bonfires on the hills.
It suits readers who want tragedy on a human scale, anyone coming to Hardy after Tess or Far from the Madding Crowd, and students looking at how setting can shape character. The year-and-a-day structure gives it a clean, almost seasonal shape.
