The Return of the Native
The heather-covered hills of Egdon Heath loom over the lives of its inhabitants like a god who does not care. Into this wild, ancient landscape returns Clym Yeobright, home from Paris with plans to improve his native place through education. But his wife Eustacia Vye, the dark-haired queen of the heath, has different dreams: she married him hoping he would carry her away to a brighter world. What unfolds is a tragedy of mismatched desires, where every attempt at escape tightens the noose. Damon Wildeve drifts between Eustacia and her cousin Thomasin, Mrs Yeobright watches her son's marriage collapse with devastating consequences, and the heath itself seems to conspire against happiness. Hardy builds his tragedy with the inevitability of Greek drama, yet infuses every page with such atmospheric richness that Egdon Heath becomes almost a character itself, ancient and indifferent, its bonfires and starlight bearing witness to ruin. This is romantic illusion at its most fatal: characters who see each other not as they are, but as they need them to be.
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“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?””
— Thomas Hardy
“Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.””
— Thomas Hardy
“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.””
— Thomas Hardy
“She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.””
— Thomas Hardy
“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;””
— Thomas Hardy
“To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.””
— Thomas Hardy
“To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.””
— Thomas Hardy
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Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-native-b1c73a52-e25e-4b21-8cd3-8f90add863ac.Hardy, T. (n.d.). The Return of the Native. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-native-b1c73a52-e25e-4b21-8cd3-8f90add863acHardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-native-b1c73a52-e25e-4b21-8cd3-8f90add863ac.
