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The Return of the Native (Penguin Classics) Paperback – August 1, 1999
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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 Return of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.
Penny Boumelha’s introduction examines the classical and mythological references and the interplay of class and sexuality in the novel. This edition, essentially Hardy’s original book version of the novel, also includes notes, a glossary, chronology and bibliography.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Print length496 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateAugust 1, 1999
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 1.17 inches
- ISBN-100140435182
- ISBN-13978-0140435184
- Lexile measure1040
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Editorial Reviews
Review
--D. H. Lawrence
About the Author
Patricia Ingham is Senior Research Fellow and Reader at St Anne's College, Oxford. She has written on the Victorian novel and on Hardy in particular. She is the General Editor of all of Hardy's fiction in the Penguin Classics and has edited Gaskell's North and South for the series.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Classics; First Printing, Notations edition (August 1, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 496 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0140435182
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140435184
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Lexile measure : 1040
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 1.17 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #341,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #864 in Classic American Literature
- #8,850 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #18,504 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the author
Thomas Hardy was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, on 2 June 1840. He was educated locally and at sixteen was articled to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London and found employment with another architect, Arthur Blomfield. He now began to write poetry and published an essay. By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks's assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady.
On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts.
After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy's finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset.
Photo by Bain News Service, publisher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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The social level of the novel is propelled by a drama of conflicted motives and passions and, like many of his novels, involves at least one, sometimes two, romantic triangles. At the natural level, however, the characters contend with the landscape and burn bonfires to ward off the darkness. Although the culture is ostensibly Christian, the residents still observe certain seasonal rituals such as harvest festivals and maypole dances of their pagan ancestors:
'The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, have in some way or other survived medieval doctrine.'
There is no utter villain in this story. At the center is the raven-haired beauty Eustacia Vye, who has come to live with her grandfather on the heath after the death of her parents, with whom she grew up in the slightly more cosmopolitan port of Budmouth. She yearns for passion, excitement, music and culture exemplified in her fantasy of life in Paris. The 'native' of the title, Clym Yeobright, returns from Paris where he has apprenticed as a jeweler. While she romanticizes Clym and his association with her beloved Paris, he has had his fill of the foreign capital and returned to his home territory to start a school and elevate the minds of the Egdon youth. Previously, Eustacia had been romantically attached to the local innkeeper Damon Wildeve, who procrastinated in his engagement to Clym's cousin Thomasin largely because he was so entranced by Eustacia. Clym's mother, Thomasin's aunt, feels that what was set in motion must continue to proceed and encourages Thomasin to marry Damon as soon as possible to eliminate the gossip that arose among the townspeople after Thomasin returned from a nearby town where she and Wildeve had planned to marry but were prevented from it when an irregularity was detected with the license.
In the wake of the marriage of Thomasin and Wildeve, Clym and Eustacia marry despite the objections of Clym's mother, who distrusts Eustacia and to a certain extent shares the perception of some of the more superstitious residents that Eustacia is a witch who schemes to ensnare men that are caught in the spell of her beauty. One of them even creates a wax sculpture of her, punctures it with pins and burns it in the fireplace. Eustacia roams the hillside at night and she does burn bonfires and stands in their light by herself but they are signal fires for Wildeve to meet her.
The mutual judgments and resentments between Clym's overprotective mother, who refuses to acknowledge Eustacia or attend their wedding, and Eustacia, who feels justifiably threatened by his mother's possessive hold on Clym, escalate through a series of meetings and near-meetings. Just as one of them is willing to make peace with the other, events occur that create tragedies of errors.
Clym is oblivious to his wife's needs and ignores her ever present but unspoken hope that he will abandon the plans for a school and take her back to Paris with him. Caught between losing the support of his mother and the happiness of his marriage, he is further impaired by the onset of blindness. He reads entirely too much, resulting in the neglect of his wife and the onset of an optical illness that is not helped by the fact that he reads by the insufficient light of candles. Physiologically, I don't think reading in dim lights causes even occasional blindness although it does contribute to eye strain. Clym's intermittent blindness serves more of a symbolic function that a plausibly realistic one.
Meanwhile, despite their desires to be faithful to their legal spouses, Eustacia and Wildeve are drawn persistently to each other. They have slightly differing romanticized visions of each other but each of them wants deliverance from the mundanity of life on the heath. Feeling judged, scorned and misunderstood, Eustacia, like Shakespeare's Lear, goes out on the heath in the middle of a torrential storm and rails against the elemental fates:
'I can't go, I can't go!' she moaned. 'No money: I can't go! And if I could, what comfort to me? I must drag on next year as I have dragged on this year, and the year after that as before. How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!...I do not deserve my lot!' she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. 'O the cruelty of putting me into this imperfect, ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!'
Although Eustacia has been compared with two other passionate, doomed 19th century heroines, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, I see her as more of a forerunner to Edith Wharton's Lily Bart from 'The House of Mirth', who shares Eustacia's inflexible pride and (as she sees it) integrity but feels that doors have been shut in her face at every turn. The tragic hammer of Fate does seem to bear down on her with more indifference even then it does with the other doomed characters in the novel and is the only character that could be considered a tragic hero.
There is another integral character in the novel, the reddleman turned dairy farmer Diggory Venn. I had never heard the term 'reddleman' until I read this novel. A reddleman makes and sells reddle or red chalk made from red clay, who roves the countryside selling it to farmers for marking their sheep. Due to the constant contact with the reddle, Diggory's skin has acquired a reddish complexion, lending him a devilish appearance to the superstitious rural folk. Despite his Mephistophelian appearance, Diggory is noble, a force for good in the lives of those around him. It should come as no surprise that at the conclusion he and Thomasin form the happy couple that lives as happily ever after as one can ever live in a Hardy novel.
Sometimes it seems as though Hardy is a sadistic, vengeful Old Testament god to his characters, piling one disaster on top of another. His characters often seem like a cast of Jobs who, unlike the original Biblical figure, succumb to the despair that is everywhere apparent around them. In 'The Return of the Native' these disasters may be mountains made from molehills, only if one concedes that they are comprised of billions of molehills. He is an occasionally merciful god, allowing some characters such as Diggory and Thomasin to continue on past the boundaries of the novel to live relatively peaceful, happy lives. One of the redeeming features of Hardy's fiction is that his narrative skill always makes the bleakness of the unfolding events palatable and even, to this reader, powerfully moving and enjoyable.
His most popular novels deal with matters of love, hard work and the forced honesty of the inhabitants of Hardy's world in South West England. Hardy is a master of plot and well defined characters, who for the most part are not from the English nobility, they are working people who nevertheless encounter many of the same problems in life as the rich, maybe even more because of their lower station. Usually, he depicts strong-willed women who battle the prejudices of their era, sometimes they triumph, others times they lose. All in all, it's hard to put down a novel one is reading because every page has an immediacy that pulls you on to the next page, and the next until you find yourself at the end of the book.
Not Hardy's best. It just lacked.....depth. I felt there wasn't much depth to the characters. I didn't feel attached to them, or even sad at the tragedy. The story was very forgettable, in my opinion. If you ask me, his best stories are "The Woodlanders" and "Far from the Madding Crowd".
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Reviewed in India on February 8, 2024
そして値段も安い!こんなに安くていいのだろうかと心配になるくらいです。
とにかくアラン・リックマンのファンは買ってほしいです、、、、。
Und liebe Damen: Sie werden garantiert das Gefühl haben, dass Mr. Rickman neben ihnen sitzt dieses Buch ausschließlich für Sie liest. Viel Vergnügen, es lohnt sich.