"The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy (1878)

This was the second of Hardy’s major novels (after Far From The Madding Crowd in 1874), set again in a rural community in a region of unfarmed and sparsely-populated semi-wild heaths in the south-west of England baptised Wessex by Hardy, closely resembling his own native Dorsetshire where he had been raised and where he had returned to settle down shortly before undertaking this deeply-felt novel of the intense inter-relationships and tensions between a man and his mother, between three men and the two women they are attracted to, between the wild beauty of the untamed Nature that surrounds them and the winds of change blowing in from the prosperous towns on the sea-coast, between the call of the senses and the constraints imposed by a society with an almost-infinite scale of social hierarchies and codes, between the appeal of a pastoral way of life hardly changed for centuries and the glitter of big-city sophistication epitomised by Paris, where Clym, the "male lead" has been living and where Eustacia, the "female lead" would very much prefer to be.

Hardy succeeds in elevating the tone of this tale of pastoral passion by an impressive and always-pertinent array of biblical, mythological and classical references that reinforce his sedate but smooth-flowing prose to add significance and substance to this story of people living in wide-open spaces who are as hemmed in and constrained by their impulses as if they were enclosed in a prison, a story that Hardy succeeds in infusing with considerable intensity indeed.

(143,000 words)

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