The Return of the Native -- Thomas Hardy

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 fianc , Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. <p/>As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed to the deep expression of nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man."<br><br><b>Author:</b> Thomas Hardy<br><b>Publisher:</b> Penguin Random House LLC (No Starch)<br><b>Published:</b> 02/13/2001<br><b>Pages:</b> 448<br><b>Binding Type:</b> Paperback<br><b>Weight:</b> 0.70lbs<br><b>Size:</b> 8.14h x 5.01w x 0.99d<br><b>ISBN:</b> 9780375757181<br><br><b>Accelerated Reader:</b><br><b>Reading Level:</b> 10.2<br><b>Point Value:</b> 42<br><b>Interest Level:</b> Upper Grade<br><b>Quiz #/Name: </b>5996 / Return of the Native<br><br><p><b>About the Author</b><br>Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in a thatched-roof cottage in upper Bockhampton, Dorset, England, a prophetic birthplace that