The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy, 1878

Victorian novels

Egdon Heath frames a story of people whose hopes pull them towards different lives.

Read the book Contents

Length: 48 chapters
Reading time: About 9 hr 53 min
Words: 141,141

About the book

Before introducing its human conflicts, the novel gives Egdon Heath a prolonged presence of its own. Twilight, roads and the open ground establish a setting in which travellers and residents can seem temporary against the landscape around them.

Hardy's story concerns attachment to place and the wish to escape it. His opening encourages attention to atmosphere, pace and the different scales of human and natural time. The interest lies in the pressure between personal expectation and surroundings that cannot simply be reshaped to satisfy it, as private desires enter a closely connected rural world.

On these lists

Victorian novels

This edition

Text from Standard Ebooks, who proofread and typeset it and dedicate their edition to the public domain. Thomas Hardy died more than 70 years ago, so the work is out of copyright in the UK. Includes the original epigraph, preface, frontispiece.