The Return of the Native (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Hardy, Thomas

3.87

38,590 ratings by Goodreads

9780192834065: The Return of the Native (Oxford World's Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192834061 ISBN 13: 9780192834065

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998

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The passionate Eustacia Vye feels herself imprisoned in the wild, isolated Egdon Heath ("`Tis my cross...and will be my death"), and although she longs for a love that will free her from it, her marriage only serves to trap her deeper within it. Her husband, Clem Yeobright, is the native of the novel's title, returned from Paris with a scheme for educating the heath-folk. Though Hardy's story is one of fatally tangled relationships, the greatest effect upon the reader is made by Egdon Heath itself: "The storm was its lover, and the wind its friend". This edition, retains the text of the novel's first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy's original intentions. It is therefore possible for modern readers to share the experience of those who read the story when it appeared in 1878.

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Review:

" Most of Hardy' s novels, and particularly the early ones, have a Shakespearean power of creating a unique world and climate of being . . . "The Return of the Native" is . . . thoughtful, valedictory, poetic, tinged with the somberness of an uncertainty which seems to well up from the depths of the author' s own subconscious . . . Hardy' s sense of the tragic life of human beings, mere small fragments of consciousness in a vast uncaring universe, comes directly from his own youthful awareness of the place and circumstances described in the novel." - from the Introduction by John Bayley

Most of Hardy s novels, and particularly the early ones, have a Shakespearean power of creating a unique world and climate of being . . . The Return of the Native is . . . thoughtful, valedictory, poetic, tinged with the somberness of an uncertainty which seems to well up from the depths of the author s own subconscious . . . Hardy s sense of the tragic life of human beings, mere small fragments of consciousness in a vast uncaring universe, comes directly from his own youthful awareness of the place and circumstances described in the novel. from the Introduction by John Bayley"

"Most of Hardy's novels, and particularly the early ones, have a Shakespearean power of creating a unique world and climate of being . . . The Return of the Native is . . . thoughtful, valedictory, poetic, tinged with the somberness of an uncertainty which seems to well up from the depths of the author's own subconscious . . . Hardy's sense of the tragic life of human beings, mere small fragments of consciousness in a vast uncaring universe, comes directly from his own youthful awareness of the place and circumstances described in the novel." -from the Introduction by John Bayley

About the Author:

THOMAS HARDY, whose writings immortalized the Wessex countryside and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, was born near Egdon Heath in Dorset in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonemason. As a youth he trained as an architect and in 1862 obtained a post in London. During this time he began seriously to write poetry, which remained his first literary love and his last. In 1867-68, his first novel was refused publication, but Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), his first Wessex novel, did well enough to convince him to continue writing. In 1874, Far from the Madding Crowd, published serially and anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine, became a great success. Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874, and in 1875 they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life. There he wrote The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). With Tess, Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the "infidelity" and "obscenity" of this great novel he had subtitled "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented." Jude the Obscure aroused even greater indignation and was denounced as pornography. Hardy's disgust at the reaction to Jude led him to announce in 1896 that he would never write fiction again. He published Wessex Poems in 1898, Poems of the Past and Present in 1901, and from 1903 to 1908, The Dynasts, a huge drama in which Hardy's conception of the Immanent Will, implicit in the tragic novels, is most clearly stated. In 1912, Hardy's wife, Emma, died. The marriage was childless and had long been a troubled one, but in the years after her death, Hardy memorialized her in several poems. At seventy-four, he married his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale, herself a writer of children's books and articles, with whom he lived happily until his death in 1928. His heart was buried in the Wessex countryside; his ashes were placed next to Charles Dickens's in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

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