The return of the native - Thomas Hardy

"To be loved to madness — such was her great desire."

The passionate Eustacia Vye feels herself imprisoned in the wild, isolated Egdon Heath, and searches for a love that will free her from it. “This is my cross — and will be my death” she says of the Heath, and though she marries, her marriage only serves to trap her deeper within it. Her husband, Clym Yeobright, is the native of the novel’s title, returned from Paris with a scheme for educating the heathfolk. 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 love, and the wind its friend.”

This edition of The Return of the Native, unlike any other currently available, retains the text of the novel’s first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions.