Thomas Hardy brings vibrant, fascinating, fatally flawed people to life for his reader and in "The Return of the Native," he also brings the character of Egdon Heath to life as well. His people, Eustacia, Clym, Wildive, Tamsie, Diggory Venn, Mrs. Yeobright, are all people we recognize, sympathize with, and even cheer for. Of course, with Hardy, as with Greek tragedy, cheer as mightily as you will, tragedy will definitely manage to be snatched from the jaws of joy.

Hardy is not summer beach reading. It's probably best to read "Native" on a cold, blustry, January evening, with the wind howling outside, making bare branches scratch at your window, while you curl up under a warm afghan, single malt at your elbow and book on your lap.

Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite authors of English literature, a love that developed from my first encounter with "Jude the Obscure" in high school back in Malaysia. I soon devoured most of his books and found Hardy's unflinching portrayal of human relationships with all of its flaws and triumphs to be credibly written and compelling. Another reason I love Hardy's works is because of the atmospheric setting where the landscape itself becomes almost a character in the various novels.

"The Return of the Native" was controversial for its time because it dealt with the theme of illicit relationships. One of the novel's central character, the darkly beautiful Eustacia Vye, is deeply flawed, always yearning for something more beyond the heath she so despises. This constant clamoring for a better, more adventurous life leads her to make disastrous choices that have tragic consequences for her and several other characters in the story. It can be a depressing read but it also has its redeeming features and I would definitely recommend it as one of Hardy's best works.

This 1978 Easton Press edition comes in a handsome dark green genuine leather binding, with a satin ribbon page marker, gilt edging, 22-karat gold details on the cover, spine, and back, and moire endpapers. It is also illustrated with wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker. This is an heirloom quality edition that will enhance any collector's library.

In Thomas Hardy's novels, natural settings are always important. However, in 'The Return of the Native' Egdon Heath, located near the south coast of Hardy's fictional Wessex area, is a brutal, abiding reminder of the harshness of the landscape and the magnetism, extending beyond its mere gravitational pull, that it exerts on its inhabitants. We get the sense that these occupants, even the ones who claim to love it, are consigned to reside on it and, to a certain extent, do its bidding. In the preface he wrote to the 1895 edition (it was originally published in 1878), Hardy imagines that this landscape might be the location roamed by that unyielding Shakespearean character, King Lear.

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.

Hardy is one of the greatest English novelists. Though the plot devices seem a little contrived at times, his books sweep the reader into the turbulent currents of the lives he portrays. This novel, like his others, is set in Dorset, and Hardy is a master at portraying the sights, sounds and atmosphere of that part of England. This work in particular evokes the brooding ambience of Egdon Heath, which itself becomes almost a character. The West Country dialect of some his characters is colorful, droll and adds energy and authenticity to the story. Hardy is able to elevate the lives of completely ordinary people to the stature of tragic heroes and heroines.

Thomas Hardy is not well known among most American readers; however, he represents the best of British literary tradition in the 19th century.
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.