The Return of the Native

Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath. Hearing that Clym Yeobright is to return from Paris, she sets her heart on marrying him, believing that through him she can leave rural life and find fulfilment elsewhere. But she is to be disappointed, for Clym has dreams of his own, and they have little in common with Eustacia's. Their unhappy marriage causes havoc in the lives of those close to them, in particular Damon Wildeve, Eustacia's former lover, Clym's mother and his cousin Thomasin. The Retun of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.

About the Author

Formerly a prize-winning architectural student, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) went on to become a prolific novelist and poet. The Return of the Native is the third of Hardy's great series of Wessex novels. The 'partly real, partly dream-country' of Wessex forms the wild and dramatic background for the conflict, solitude, passion and tragedy so powerfully illustrated in The Return of the Native. Hardy's novels Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are also published in the Penguin English Library.