What is The Return of the Native about?

The Return of the Native opens with a description of Egdon Heath — the wild moorland of Dorset — so extended and so insistent that it becomes clear the Heath is the novel's central character before a human being appears. Into this landscape Hardy introduces Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant who has returned from Paris to Egdon with idealistic plans to start a school, and Eustacia Vye, a woman of intense passionate nature who burns to escape the Heath entirely and who has been waiting for someone exactly like Clym to provide her exit.

The novel is a study of incompatibility. Clym wants to return to the place he came from and find meaning in simple rural education; Eustacia wants the world Clym has abandoned and married him on the assumption that he would take her to it. These misaligned desires are not the result of bad faith — both characters are drawn with full seriousness — but of two people who genuinely cannot see each other past the screen of their own needs. Hardy is writing about the tragedy of wanting incompatible things from the same person, and the Heath itself seems to enforce the verdict: every attempt to escape or transform results in a return to the starting point.

Hardy's prose in this period is dense and literary — more demanding than Dickens, with extended natural descriptions that carry symbolic weight but slow the narrative. The structure is unusual: the novel is divided into six "Books" and was originally planned to end with Book Five, which is the more honestly tragic conclusion. Book Six, added under pressure from serialization, is a softer coda that many critics regard as the weaker ending. Hardy himself acknowledged this, and later editions included a note suggesting the ending was provisional.

This is not Hardy's most accessible novel — Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd are easier entries. But readers who respond to the landscape-as-fate, the sustained tragic register, and the unusual sympathy Hardy extends to his most passionate (and most destructive) characters will find it irreplaceable. Eustacia Vye is one of the most fully rendered women in Victorian fiction — not because Hardy agrees with her but because he takes her desires as seriously as he takes anyone's.