The Return of the Native

On Egdon Heath, a wild stretch of Wessex moorland, the restless and beautiful Eustacia Vye longs to escape to the brilliant life of Paris. When Clym Yeobright, a native of the heath, comes home from a successful career in the diamond trade in Paris, she sees him as her way out, while Clym dreams only of staying and becoming a teacher to the poor people of the heath. Their marriage, and the jealousies around them, lead to tragedy.

Published in 1878, the novel opens with a famous chapter that describes the heath itself as a living, brooding presence. Thomas Hardy grew up at the edge of such heathland in Dorset, and the book's bonfires, storms and Gothic atmosphere make it one of his most memorable. See The Mayor of Casterbridge and his life.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.

After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.