THOMAS HARDY
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
Edited by Simon Gatrell
With a newlon by Margaret R. Higonnet
mcy Barrineau
"To be loved to matiness-such was her great desire'
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 Yeonright, 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 fre…