One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawre...
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Nov 08, 2011
Kim
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I have spent the last thirty five years convinced that I do not like Thomas Hardy. I know how it happened. Reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles when I was in high school and again at university made a lasting - and a negative - impression on me. Admittedly, I went on to read Jude the Obscure and Far from the Madding Crowd, also while I was at university, and quite liked both novels. Notwithstanding this, my dislike of Tess overshadowed whatever appreciation for Hardy's work I might otherwise More...
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Sep 02, 2009
From one of Monty Python's albums:
Commentator: Hello, and welcome to Dorchester, where a very good crowd has turned out to watch local boy Thomas Hardy write his new novel "The Return Of The Native", on this very pleasant July morning. This will be his eleventh novel and the fifth of the very popular Wessex novels, and here he comes! Here comes Hardy, walking out towards his desk. He looks confident, he looks relaxed, very much the man in form, as he acknowledges this very More...
Commentator: Hello, and welcome to Dorchester, where a very good crowd has turned out to watch local boy Thomas Hardy write his new novel "The Return Of The Native", on this very pleasant July morning. This will be his eleventh novel and the fifth of the very popular Wessex novels, and here he comes! Here comes Hardy, walking out towards his desk. He looks confident, he looks relaxed, very much the man in form, as he acknowledges this very More...
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Jan 10, 2011
julieta
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I have to confess that I started reading Thomas Hardy because I found one of his books (Jude the Obscure) in a used bookstore in Mexico city, sold very cheaply. I am not one to let a cheap book pass, especially if it has a nice old look to it, so I went for it. I am happy I did. Since then I have always enjoyed his tragedies. Because, they are, tragedies.
But for some reason I find that if he can make such tragedies out of so few elements, and put them together in such a gripping way, well, More...
But for some reason I find that if he can make such tragedies out of so few elements, and put them together in such a gripping way, well, More...
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Dec 17, 2009
Sundry
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Good medicine. I hated this book when I had to read it in high school. Maybe because I’d assumed from the title that it was going to be about American Indians. (In my defense, I’d been forced to read The Last of the Mohicans the previous year, and may have thought high school literature was all about the aboriginals.) Maybe because the entire first chapter is a description of Egdon Heath; one that still elicited a groan from me when I started listening to the audiobook a few weeks ago.
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Jun 23, 2008
J
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There used to be a lot more words in the world. Now we're all about short, blunt sentences. So obvious. So boring.
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Jul 04, 2008
Frank
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I kept falling asleep at the beginning of this book. Finally I gave up. I mentioned to my friend Rich that I'd stalled out, and he quoted his high school English teacher, whose words predicted Rich's own experience of the novel: "For the first fifty pages, we would think Return of the N the worst book we had ever read and after that it would seem the best book we had ever read." So I pressed on, and sure enough, around page fifty the book grabbed me and didn't let go till I finished.
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Apr 01, 2008
Erin
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Crushed by Things Beyond Control: A Review of The Return of the Native
Poor Thomas Hardy. He was pursued by a fate almost as cruel as that which crushes his characters. As a boy he was too well educated to pursue a quiet life on the heath, when he grew up to his novels were too mercilessly condemned by Victorian moralists for him to live in peace as a writer. He turned exclusively to poetry (depending on your stance that can also be counted as tragedy) and his estranged wife died, and a More...
Poor Thomas Hardy. He was pursued by a fate almost as cruel as that which crushes his characters. As a boy he was too well educated to pursue a quiet life on the heath, when he grew up to his novels were too mercilessly condemned by Victorian moralists for him to live in peace as a writer. He turned exclusively to poetry (depending on your stance that can also be counted as tragedy) and his estranged wife died, and a More...
Sep 18, 2010
Jen
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"Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world. She took the midnight train goin' anywhere..."
Yep, Journey and Thomas Hardy DO have something in common: They both understand a woman's intense yearnings for something beyond small town life.
The best advice I can give to any would-be readers of Return of the Native is to stay with this tale; it gets better and better. In all honesty, one could probably skip the first 3 chapters (roughly 40 pages) and not miss much More...
Yep, Journey and Thomas Hardy DO have something in common: They both understand a woman's intense yearnings for something beyond small town life.
The best advice I can give to any would-be readers of Return of the Native is to stay with this tale; it gets better and better. In all honesty, one could probably skip the first 3 chapters (roughly 40 pages) and not miss much More...
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Jan 23, 2009
Chrissa
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The chief pleasure and chief fault of this story are at once the same, the clear, poetic descriptions of Egdon heath, which render the presence of the actors in the story supernumerary upon its impassive surface. When Hardy speaks of savage flies who are ignorant of larders or when he describes the way the heath replicates the face of nature and the season, the book is beautiful, and I am captivated.
When he describes the people who blunder through each others' lives, I wait impatient More...
When he describes the people who blunder through each others' lives, I wait impatient More...
Dec 23, 2008
Em
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I thought it would be nice to re-read all the classics I had to read for AP English, so I started with this one since I remembered liking it in high school. How different it is to read things now,alone, instead of with a whole class and with the fear of Mrs. Hazen's test coming up in my mind. I almost didn't make it through the book simply because i couldn't get through the first chapter. I didn't really care to read a whole chapter about the surrounding countryside, but once characters were int
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Dec 24, 2011
Suzanne
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Despite an incredulous plot at times, I appreciated this book for its sheer language, depth of thought and observation (although cumbersome at times), detail of landscape, and love for a time, place, and ethos that was exotic/foreign even in Hardy's era. Not as moralistic, flowery, or allegorical as Hawthorne and not as quaint as Dickens, Hardy's Return of the Native nevertheless reflects something of both those authors and their characteristics. From another angle, add a few dwarfs, beasts, and
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Sep 08, 2011
Alex
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I came into this one worried. Hardy's "Tess of the D'urbervilles" is on my "never could finish" list. It bored me to tears, and has been forgotten. but with the finishing of Return of the Native, I am now drawn to find out if I share that old sentiment, because I found this brilliant.
Sure, the language is gorgeous when it is done being dense... often the language can be as dense as the heath itself, which goes miles toward explicating the setting. I also hugely appr More...
Sure, the language is gorgeous when it is done being dense... often the language can be as dense as the heath itself, which goes miles toward explicating the setting. I also hugely appr More...
Nov 27, 2010
Patrick
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I am having a great time re-reading Hardy's novels. I couldn't get enough of his witting in college (I must have been a maudlin soul) and am not taking up the gauntlet again. This classic is about a romantic pentagon set on England's Egdon Heath in the mid 19th century. Those raised on the heath view it comfortably as homespun landscape, but newcomers consider it desolate, bleak and even hostile. For this heath with its mysterious rainbarrow is a curious juxtaposition of ancient ways and relics
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Jun 19, 2010
Rebecca
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Exhausting and depressing read, yet satisfying in the end (the extended ending featuring Thomasin and Diggory). The descriptions of nature and prime characters are mesmerizing; these characters become real living persons with incredible depth of passion and personality. I did not like Eustacia or Wildeve, but they are too vivid to brush off. Clym is simply a mamma's boy, without the ambition others were too quick to assume of him. Mrs. Yeobright is a steady, forthright woman whose end did no
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May 25, 2010
Surreysmum
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[These notes were made in 1983:]. Another Hardy I enjoyed wholeheartedly! (This could become a habit). Here the "nobleman beneath his station" is really out of place - a sort of alien creature, red from top to toe (a seller of red sheep-marking). But this time, if Hardy's protestations are to be believed, he wasn't really meant to get the girl, and Hardy's principal interest was clearly with his "upper" heroine, Eustacia Vye, her less-than-satisfactory lover, Wildeve, and
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Jun 24, 2009
Bruce
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Egdon Heath is a sparsely settled wilderness in the southwest of England. It’s dominated by the wind, the sky and the feral vegetation of fern and furze. It is, as the author introduces it in the first chapter, “a face on which time has made but little impression.” To its native inhabitants it’s a quiet county refuge from the bustle and commotion of the mid-nineteenth century, but to young Eustacia Vye it’s a wilderness of exile from civilized life from which she has little hope of escape. Damon
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May 17, 2009
Adrian
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This was my second Hardy. I loved The Mayor of Casterbridge so much that I went right into this one. The relentless breaking of the character in the first book made me like this one a bit better. In The Return of the Native, the protagonist's hope is not destroyed at the end. (I think it's in this book where there's a long description of a walk through a heath that is poetry. But regardless of what passage you're reading, Hardy's writing is the most beautiful prose I've ever read.
I w More...
I w More...
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Jan 13, 2010
Steve
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This is Hardy's best novel and reveals all too chillingly the repercussions which can surround misunderstandings and missed opportunities. The author has also brilliantly allocated a key role in the unfolding of the tragic events to the unforgiving landscape of Egdon Heath which from the opening chapter assumes a mantle of being one of the central characters in the plot. The heath will cause the demise of more than one of the human protagonists which people this story of misdirected love and avi
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Aug 30, 2009
Steve
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I sortof read this book my senior year of high school in Mr. Runtz's class. It was our reading over spring break. The first chapters dragged on and on and on and on with descriptions of mountain side that contributed nothing to anything. Later that semester, it was Mr. Runtz's birthday, and Ed Mood, the faculty member who was the technical theater director (I built sets for plays in high school) took some theater kids to Runtz's room the night before his birthday. We draped black theater cur
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Aug 11, 2011
Moon 佛月球 Будда Луны
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∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝•EPICUREAN LOVE•∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝δ∝
Born out of the intensest human desires are unbridled sensual passions that begrudgingly awaits physical gratification from the world without. A human dilemma that can cripple the soul to somnolence as sensuality overpowers spirituality from its true course. It ransacks the mind out of reason as the senses chase its pursuits of epicurean yearnings, surrendering body and soul to the ambition of bucolic longings.
The farther the More...
Born out of the intensest human desires are unbridled sensual passions that begrudgingly awaits physical gratification from the world without. A human dilemma that can cripple the soul to somnolence as sensuality overpowers spirituality from its true course. It ransacks the mind out of reason as the senses chase its pursuits of epicurean yearnings, surrendering body and soul to the ambition of bucolic longings.
The farther the More...
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Jul 07, 2010
Stewart
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About 45 years ago while in high school, I had to read "The Return of the Native." I read a biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin a few weeks ago and decided to reread his 1878 novel. After so many years, I remembered not one detail of the book or, for that matter, even the plot summary. I have come to the conclusion that after 15 years, maybe sooner, the typical reader (who doesn't have a photographic memory) will have forgotten all the details of any book he or she has read.
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Jan 18, 2010
Patrick
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jan 27, 2012
Fatma
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I'm absolutely blown away by this book. I keep thinking that it must have caused some controversy to be published in 19th century England.
It is set in and around Egdon Heath, and follows the lives of its inhabitants, in particular that of the Yeobright family, of Wildeve, and of Eustacia Vye, and the entanglements wrought upon their lives by love and fate.
I would describe it as a tragedy in the most classic form, despite certain plot twists (no spoilers). I loved the stark E More...
It is set in and around Egdon Heath, and follows the lives of its inhabitants, in particular that of the Yeobright family, of Wildeve, and of Eustacia Vye, and the entanglements wrought upon their lives by love and fate.
I would describe it as a tragedy in the most classic form, despite certain plot twists (no spoilers). I loved the stark E More...
Jan 17, 2012
Caitlin
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"The Return of the Native" lives up to Hardy's landscape portrayal, but suffers in its plot. Hardy always fills his book with a convincing mood and atmosphere. The landscape of the book has such a strong effect, especially in his Wessex novels, that it is essentially a character too. This book is no exception. The book is full of the impressions of the heath, it permeates the decisions of every single character of the book, and it alone comes out triumphant. This is a story of two coup
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Jun 07, 2009
Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to the village of his birth, inspired to improve the life of its men and women. But his plans are upset when he falls in love with a beautiful, darkly discontented girl, Eustacia Vye, who longs to escape from her provincial surroundings.
One of Hardy's classic statements about modern love, courtship, and marriage, The Return of the Native is set in the pastoral village of Egdon Heath. The fiery Eustacia Vye, wishing only for passionate love, believes More...
One of Hardy's classic statements about modern love, courtship, and marriage, The Return of the Native is set in the pastoral village of Egdon Heath. The fiery Eustacia Vye, wishing only for passionate love, believes More...
Jul 01, 2011
Jallioop
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Starts off really slowly (think James Michener, the way he starts with the beginning of time) - beginning is totally devoted to a description of the heath. I get that the setting is very important to this particular book, but, boy, what a slow start. A more contemporary novel would probably have tried harder to hook the reader with some plot action and then done the setting explanation. However, since this was a book club book, I skimmed the heath description until I got to some action. Rest of
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Nov 03, 2011
Patrick
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Amazon Review:
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willf More...
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willf More...
Nov 08, 2011
Jaykumar
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Aug 09, 2011
Juanita
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This is by far the 'easiest read' of Thomas Hardy's books that I have read so far. The first couple of chapters were hard for me to get through, I have never been one for long descriptions of scenery, but once they were over the book picked up a lot more. I like how Hardy puts random twists in the end because I know that I won't be able to guess HOW things will happen, even if I suspect a specific end result. I really liked Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but the Return of the Native is much more tra
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Oct 13, 2010
Nicki
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The book opens with an extensive description of Egdon Heath, which sets the tone for this incredibly atmospheric novel.
This novel is populated by four central characters. The “Native” is Clym Yeobright who returns to Egdon Heath after pursuing the fanciful life in Paris as diamond salesman. Eustacia, who has a strong desire to escape Egdon Heath and embark on a life of adventure, makes Clym the object of her affection before she ever lays eyes on him. She is carried away by More...
