The Return of the Native

by Thomas Hardy

Other authorsGeorge Woodcock (Editor)

Paperback, 1978

Status

Available

Call number

823.8

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Classics (1978), Paperback, 496 pages

Description

Dip into a classic work of fiction that many critics regard as one of the novels that helped to usher in the modern era of literature. When it was originally published, Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native rocked Victorian England with its frank discussion of titillating subjects such as out-of-wedlock relationships. Today, the novel offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the mores and moral constraints of a bygone era.

User reviews

LibraryThing member katiekrug

This classic of British literature was great, despite everyone in it being a hot mess, each in their own way. I loved the tension between love vs. possession and nature vs. society, and Hardy's descriptions of the heath were very evocative, if occasionally over-long. Eustacia is a piece of work,

Clym is a boring milquetoast, Wildeve is a d-bag, and Thomasin would benefit from some 21st century ideas of agency. Yes, I'm being a bit flip and reductive, but I truly did enjoy listening to this, especially as read by Alan Rickman. It was my first Hardy but I don't think it will be my last.

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LibraryThing member aethercowboy

The Return of the Native is one of those books you're forced to read in high school. And as such, you're prone to hate it, because high school English teachers make you dissect the creature of literature before you actually get a chance to observe it in action, and you are forced to make

observations on the structure of the cold, dead literature, instead of actually observing the living literature in its natural environment.

If this is you, please give it a second chance.

The story itself is all in the title: someone comes (back) to town. This town, Egdon Heath (one of the few towns in non-genre literature to be widely considered a character in its own right), and its inhabitants receive Clement "Clym" Yeobright back from Paris.

It was Thomas Wolfe to whom we attribute the quote "You can never go home again." This is not to mean "We'll lock up behind you, and post sentries," but rather, as time flows, nothing is truly immutable. When you do come back home, it won't be the same. Some furniture will be moved, everybody will be older, and things will be different.

But things that are different aren't always bad. You could meet that nice raven-haired lady everyone thinks is a witch, and end up marrying her. You, thinking about settling down, her, thinking about escaping the malevolent town in which she lives.

Such is life, especially life in Edgon Heath.

This book is recommended for those who have read and enjoyed other works by Hardy, or who enjoy other literary achievements of the time. Also recommended for rereading anybody who was forced to read it in high school.

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LibraryThing member jon1lambert

I hope I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a wonderful story. The most interesting character is the reddleman whose name is Diggory Venn. He is a mysterious and unmistakeable figure who appears at every turning point in the book. His trade is selling the dark red substance that is applied

to sheep to distinguish them and he tours with his caravan the tangled web that is Egdon Heath. He becomes a mythical and symbolic figure through his red hue, the red substance covering his clothes and body. Sometimes he seems to be the devil, at others he is omniscient and a power for good. His repeated appearance signals action. Some other characters are unforgettable - the passionate Eustacia Vye with her raven hair, her impulsiveness and her knack of making the wrong decisions in love and poor Clym Yeobright, entrepreneur turned homely furze cutter, the native returned, who somehow comes to terms with the misery and despair that inflict him. There are unexpected incidents: gambling for the 50 guineas, the adder bite, the lost glove, the mummers dance, witchcraft and the drowning in the weir. To reread is to see new things and to understand so much more.

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LibraryThing member lit_chick

2007, BBC Audiobooks, Read by Alan Rickman

The Return of the Native, set exclusively on Egdon Heath, opens with reddleman Diggory Venn transporting home a naïve, disgraced Thomasin Yeobright, who was to have married innkeeper Damon Wildeve, earlier in the day. Wildeve, we soon learn, is preoccupied

with the novel’s heroine, Eustasia Vye, undoubtedly one of literature’s great characters. Eustasia is intelligent, devious, passionate, and a manipulative object of desire – I did not find her likeable, but she was completely enthralling. Believing herself superior, she detests life on the Heath, and in this vein, she sets out in self-serving pursuit of Clym Yeobright, the “native,” who has just returned to Egdon from Paris, where he has been living a prosperous life as a diamond merchant. Twists of fate thwart even the best laid plans, of course, and the characters are inexorably entwined in complex relationships which Eustacia’s ambition has set in motion.

Hardy’s language is beautifully mellifluous; the novel’s narrative is richly layered, read in many voices. Themes include the celebration of the pagan, the primitive, and the pastoral. Hardy glorifies the simplicity of life for the working classes and celebrates the pastoral for its superiority. Egdon Heath is a character in its own right; Clym experiences perfect harmony with nature when he goes to work cutting furze:

“Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod. The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down. Tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskillful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding of their old skins, when their colours are brightest. Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen.” (Bk 4, Ch 2)

The Return of the Native is timeless, the mark of a true classic for me. I cannot say enough about Alan Rickman’s accomplishment as narrator. Sublime! Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member apatt

“Hurt so good
Come on baby, make it hurt so good”
- John Mellencamp

WUT? Well, reading Thomas Hardy novels always poses this kind of challenge. They hurt, and yet I keep coming back to him because they are indeed good and this kind of hurt is like a good exercise for your EQ. In term of language,

I don’t think Hardy’s writing is particularly difficult to access. The more challenging aspects of his books are the initial meticulous scene setting and characters introduction chapters and, of course, the miserable situations that his characters get into.

“Tragedy
When the feeling's gone and you can't go on It's tragedy”

Sorry, I just had a sudden attack of Beegeesitis. Anyway, I am always glad(ish) to be back in Hardyverse, better known as Wessex, a fictional region somewhere in the south of England. A lot of pastoral mayhem seems to take place here so it is probably not an ideal vacation destination (non-existence notwithstanding). In The Return of the Native Hardy again depicts what bad marriages can do. Clym Yeobright, the returning native of the novel’s title, marries the almost preternaturally beautiful Eustacia Vye who is very discontent with her rural surroundings. She yearns for the bright lights, big cities, iStores etc., preferably in Paris. However, she is not a femme fatale, she does her best to be a good, loving wife. Unfortunately her best is of a disastrously low standard and tragedy ensues.

Much of the tragedy stems from people being unable to speak their minds, to be honest, sincere and – most of all – forgiving. Where this novel really resonates with me is the relationship between Clym and his mother. They have a very close, loving relationship until Eustacia (inadvertently) comes between them. The mother, Mrs. Yeobright, has some very strong prejudices about people of ill repute and is very quick to pass judgment on them, her unyielding mentality eventually leads to her downfall. Eustacia’s inability to settle down, to compromise with her circumstances also leads to a lot of grief and much gnashing of teeth.

As usual Hardy’s characters are very believable and vivid, and it is interesting that there is no actual villain in this book. Some characters become antagonists of sort merely through very unwise decision making and impropriety. The hero of the book is also not Clym the protagonist, but a sincere, helpful and humble man called Diggory Venn who is a “reddleman” by profession. Basically, he goes around marking flocks of sheep with a red colour (a mineral called "reddle"). Not much call for such services these days I imagine, but it makes him a fair amount of money and also causes his entire body to be red coloured. It plays hell with his attempts at courting a certain young lady, but he eventually finds a way. According to Wikipedia Hardy had a tack on a happy ending for commercial purposes so not all the characters are down in the dumps by the end of the book. Left to his own devices he would rather depress the hell out of his readers.

Over all this is a typically depressing book by Thomas Hardy. Yet I really like it and recommend it for people who are not overly sensitive or those who are too insensitive and need to emote a little.

“Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see its all a show, keep 'em laughin as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you”
- Monty Python

Well, after all that I don’t have any room left to quote an eloquent passage from this book. There are always plenty of those in a Hardy novel (so that’s hardly novel!).

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LibraryThing member kaitanya64

Classic Hardy. This book will is definitely a downer, but what did you expect. The portrayal of rural social life and its limitations and the struggles of individuals to find a deep and fulfilling life in an isolated place are beautifully portrayed. The ending is not as tragic as some of Hardy's

work, but don't expect to be soothed or uplifted either.

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LibraryThing member Schmerguls

Jan 16, 1965: As Winston Churchill lies dying, I have finsihed re-reading Hardy's Return of the Native. I last finished reading it Nov 24, 1946, and my sole comment in my diary re the book at that time: "I didn't like it." This is the most astonishing thing, since this time I was tremendously

impressed. That I could pass off so negatively such an impassioned impressivel-constructed novel is quite a revelation. I liked Eustacia Vye (Iam always amused by Hardy's women's names: Bathsheba, Lucretia. Eustacia, Thomasin) and regretted her death, altho of course Damon Wildeve was a most non-sympathy-arousing figure, and his death bothered me not at all. And I did like Diggory Venn and was happy to see him marry Thomasin, rather than Clym Yeobright doing so, toward whom i felt nothing, It seemed to me he was wrong to pay so little attention to Eustacia's wishes--he was pig-headed. I reconize the description of Egdon Heath as masterpiecey, altho I was not so impressed as some. How I would like to go to Wessex and especially Egdon Heath, to retrace all these things. But then, I suppose, when and if I get there, I'll have forgotten all of the stories and the scenes and sites will mean much less. However one would think enterprising Wessex-ers would have prepared a guidebook which would contain appropriate selections from Hardy.

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LibraryThing member brakketh

Eustacia is so deeply flawed and believable a character. Self-interested and self-aware found her a delightful character. All ends in tragedy (I wasn't a fan of the alternate ending).

LibraryThing member MaowangVater

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 Wildeve, her former boyfriend and owner of the local inn is about to marry Tamsin Yeobright, a pleasing and innocent girl from a good family, and Eustacia is suffering bitter pangs of envy and jealousy. Damon wasn’t all that much of a catch, but emotional entanglement with him was her only source of relief from the tedium of county life. And then she hears that Tamsin’s cousin is coming for a visit. He’s a clever and promising young man, a diamond trader who lives in Paris – Paris the heart of civilization, culture and beauty. But how will she manage a visit to the home of her rival? Eustacia begins to scheme.

The characters carry their passions, pride and false assumptions about the motives of their fellows with them as they criss-cross the heath, but ultimately human plans are overwhelmed by the geographies of heath, history, and social convention. But in this reading is of the final, 1912, edition of the novel, only one is able to fulfill his desire. Architect turned novelist Hardy constructs from a realistic masterpiece of beautiful and brooding tragedy. And for the listener, the combination of Hardy’s prose and Rickman’s voice is a rich and sensual delight.

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LibraryThing member AlisonY

Hardy is synonymous with 19th century English country landscapes, and never more so than in Return of the Native. Set on the mythical Egdon Heath, this novel is the next best thing to a time machine, so evocative are his descriptions of these bygone Wessex rural scenes. One doesn't just read a

Hardy novel - it's a completely immersive virtual reality experience, and for this reason he remains up there as one of my favourite novelists of all time.

Although perhaps not so well known as Hardy's greats such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, this is still a very fine novel. In typical Hardy fashion there is heartbreak and tragedy in spades, yet it is the rural landscape that almost becomes the main protagonist. The descriptions are incredibly vivid, yet their conveyance is so deftly subtle that it adds an additional dimension and depth to the story rather than getting in the way of it.

Whilst many novels of that era excel at transplanting you as a fly on the wall to the centre of English social history, I can't think of a better way to experience English natural history than through the experience of a Hardy novel. By the end of Return of the Native the heath was as familiar to me as the countryside on my own doorstep. No, on second thoughts, it was significantly more familiar. Our green space has changed in so many ways since that time, but whilst some of the flora and fauna has changed forever (for instance, adders are much rarer in number now in the English countryside than they would have been back then), it is our interaction with it which has changed most acutely. In Hardy's time the average rural dweller had little option but to traverse their local countryside by foot, often travelling many miles in a day to run an errand or visit a neighbour. Imagine, therefore, how much more familiar and in touch with the earth you become when you are literally walking through it's rural midst every day. And that is precisely the experience that Hardy brings with this novel. You feel 19th century England.

This was Hardy book number six for me, and thinking I'd already peaked with his best work I was absolutely delighted to be proved wrong with this novel.

4 stars - a wonderful sojourn in rural Victorian England.

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LibraryThing member m.belljackson

In this overdrawn and repetitive novel, Hardy offers up deceitful, tiresome Eustacia Vye in a comedy of errors fraught
with Thomasin generally being a drag. Reading about artificially tensed gambling is always trying.

Mrs. Yeobright, mother of dawdling Clym and aunt to Thomasin, is the bright light,

once a reader tires of the inexplicable
devotion of riddleman Venn to Thomasin.

As always, Thomas Hardy's nature descriptions soar.

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LibraryThing member PhilSyphe

I like the overall story of “The Return of the Native” but would’ve liked it more if not for the slow pace that occasionally leads to utter tedium.

Hardy was one of those authors capable of genius, yet at the same time he’d digress and waffle to the point of irritation.

LibraryThing member starbox

"Oh, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me!",, 29 November 2015

This review is from: Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native (Paperback)
Set on the great, bleak expanse of Egdon Heath, this is a gothic tale of love, despair and misunderstandings.
Centred on the imperious Eustacia

Vye, resentful at having to live in this god-forsaken place, we see her at first carrying on a clandestine romance with the affianced Damon Wildeve. And then into the picture comes the returned native, Clym Yeobright, cousin of Damon's fiancee. He has been carving out a successful career in Paris, and would seem an ideal match for the beautiful Eustacia who yearns to travel...
Forming something of a 'Greek chorus' are the local people, with their amusing conversations, folk customs and superstitions. And the omnipresent 'reddleman', Diggory Venn; a seller of sheep dye, and former (unsuccessful) suitor to Thomasin Yeobright, he seems to be always prowling about the heath looking out for his loved one.
At times a little over the top in emotion, this comes to an extremely good and touching ending.

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LibraryThing member eleanor_eader

Eustacia Vye lives with her grandfather on Hardy’s famous Egdon Heath, suffering its loneliness by waiting for rescue in a state of undirected passion. At first attracted to the unavailability of the formerly attentive Wildeve, she next clings to the arrival of Clym Yeobright, who falls in love

with and marries her; but her notion of rescue involves leaving the heath far behind, and Clym means to stay; and, as this is Thomas Hardy, events tend tragedy-wards.

It took me an inordinately long to time to get around to listening to this; my lassitude was caused in part by being bitten by Tess of the D’Urbervilles at an early age, and in part by not being sure whether I’d want to read along, or just listen (I don’t often ‘read’ by audiobook, and the experience wasn’t something I imagined I’d enjoy without a book in hand as well). As it turns out, all one can do is listen; Alan Rickman’s voice is tyrannical in its insistence on absolute devotion of attention.

I was hooked from word one… what rapturously bleak descriptions of the heath-land Hardy embarks upon, and my own inner voice would have done it scant justice; if the entire book had simply been Mr. Rickman vocalising Hardy’s lyrical rural scenic creation, I wouldn’t have cared, even though once he began to bring the voices of characters alive I was captured anew. Then the plot begins to emerge, people move about and Mr. Rickman slips gracefully into the background and lets the story do its work... the story is a grand mixture of the unfortunate, the desperate, the hysterical, the passive and the hopeful that I have met in Hardy’s other works; his plots, while readable, are secondary to the description, as with no other writer but each of the characters in The Return of the Native inspire pity and interest in the listener.

I have no idea if the experience of simply reading The Return of the Native would have moved me to a five-star rating; I only know that this edition of the book, with its sublime marriage of writing and reading, has absolutely captivated me for hours on end.

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LibraryThing member libraryhermit

I was introduced to this book and to this author in 1979 in grade 12 English.
I was young and impressionable. I had never read anything like this before. It's hard to talk about the prose and the content of the story without saying something inane and trite, not due to the book, but rather to my

gross incompetence as a reviewer. But the book got me hooked and I went on to read most of the other novels. I also read The Dynasts (a long poetic drama about the Napoleonic wars) and I can see now why apparently Hardy was quite frustrated with people concentrating on his novels and ignoring his poems, which he thought were the more important of the two genres.
I had to find myself deducing from this and other books by Thomas Hardy (and D. H. Lawrence, for that matter); that it doesn't matter how good, or how bad you are as a person; everybody still has equally favourable chances of being absolutely miserable in both love and in life ambition.

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LibraryThing member TerriS

I enjoyed this classic novel of star-crossed lovers. I felt it was very typical of Hardy's writing, comparing to what I've of his other books, and I liked that. I used to think I was not a big Hardy fan, but the more I read of his works, the more I like him. I will read more :)

LibraryThing member idiotgirl

Listened to this as an audiobook. To my surprise, I don't think I've ever read this book. I very much enjoyed it. The frame of the bucolic voices, the happy ending for those who can live in this world. The punishment of the two characters who cannot be easily assimilated into either this bucolic

world or the solitary, moral, bookish place Clym comes to. The man and the woman who die together are a challenging pair, not easy to like--or to dismiss. Not good, not admirable, but not bad. I very much liked this book. The landscape is so crucial here--the isolated dwellings, the paths so easy to lose, life on foot. Life in isolated settings, with punctuation of small social events--the bonfires, the party with the mummers, the May pole. I'll definitely return to this narrative.

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LibraryThing member meandmybooks

I enjoyed this one tremendously, but I suspect that without Alan Rickman's beautiful reading it would have been a four star, rather than a five star book for me. I found the story very satisfying (though I could have done with rather less about the colors, moisture levels, and textures of Egdon

Heath, even if it is, as both Wikipedia and a friend of mine have suggested, the main character, which I'm still not convinced of, btw), and am very pleased with Hardy for being willing to modify his usual doom and gloom ending as a concession to sentimental public taste! Eustacia Vye, superbly loathsome creature that she is, is a memorable character.

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LibraryThing member AMQS

Two words: Alan Rickman.

Okay, well the book deserves more than two words, and about Mr. Rickman I could go on and on. This is a heartbreaking story of love and betrayal, and of scheming and misunderstanding set on the wildly bleak and beautiful Egdon Heath. The story opens with Thomasin Yeobright

being returned home in disgrace in reddleman Diggory Venn's van, her anticipated marriage to inn-owner Damon Wildeve not taking place due to an error in the marriage license. In the aftermath of the non-wedding, Wildeve receives a bonfire signal from former lover Eustacia Vye, and the two resume their flirtation. Wildeve is ready to return to Eustacia, Eustacia considers, and Thomasin and her aunt attempt to save Thomasin's honor by proceeding with the wedding to Wildeve. Into this climate returns Thomasin's cousin Clym, the handsome, educated pride of the village, home from Paris. The idea of Clym captivates Eustacia, who is miserable on the heath and dreams of a grand life in Paris. Thus a web is woven, with strands connecting Clym, Eustacia, Thomasin, and Wildeve, with Clym's mother Mrs. Yeobright and reddleman Diggory Venn (long in love with Thomasin) worrying on the periphery.

Mr. Hardy writes well-developed characters, the most interesting and complex of which is Eustacia. With Eustacia, as with the timeless heath, marked by the ancient Celts, Mr. Hardy brings to life the uneasy blend of Christian and Pagan. "Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman." A beautiful outsider disinclined to interact with any neighbors, she is admired by some and suspected by others to be a witch. She can be maddeningly selfish, fiendishly scheming, and utterly tragic.

As for Mr. Rickman... I could hardly attend to the story for pretty much the entire first disc, I was so giddy about his narration! But as with the best narrators, Mr. Rickman gradually disappeared and the story came to full, glorious, tragic life. This was one of the best audiobook experiences ever -- right up there with Jeremy Irons narrating [Brideshead Revisited]. What a shame that Mr. Rickman never narrated another book, for this one was amazing.

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LibraryThing member jwhenderson

Hardy weaves a tale of passion and tragedy on Egdon Heath in his fictional Wessex. Eustacia Vye's desire to lead a life elsewhere is dashed when she marries Clym Yeobright (the Native) upon his return from Paris. The lives of this couple and their friends and families are depicted in detail in

Hardy's penetrating portrayal of the community on the heath. The final section provides some hope for the future, tempering the otherwise bleak landscape of the novel.

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LibraryThing member rosalita

I did it! I persevered and finished off this book just 20 minutes before it was due to vanish from my Kobo in a virtual puff of smoke. After that slow start that had me despairing that anything was ever going to happen, things did pick up and the plot moved along fairly briskly. As the rating says,

I'm glad I read it, and I would read more Hardy. In the future, though, I'll be more judicious about how many of those copious footnotes to chase down, as I found more often than not that rather than adding to my understanding of the book they simply impeded the flow of the narrative and made it seem more choppy and uneven than it probably is in actuality. Too many of them were about minute differences between the manuscript version used here (the 1878 serial publication) and later editions, which would have been immensely helpful if I were studying it and looking to make comparisons. As just a regular old reader, however, I found I didn't really give a dingdangdoodle.

And I still maintain that I read more than enough about that damned heath in the opening chapters to last me a lifetime. Good grief, no wonder everyone in this book is so freaking depressed. They must have had to listen to Hardy describe their homeland one too many times down the pub.

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LibraryThing member LynnB

There are things I loved about this book and things I strongly disliked. The good things: the description of the heath, which elevated it from simply the setting to character-like status; the character of Eustacia Vye; the serious issues portrayed such as love, loyalty, infidelity.

The not-so-good:

some of the characters (Clym, Damon) were largely archetypes; Diggery is more of a vehicle to make things happen than a solidly-drawn person; the soap-opera nature of the plot and much of the dialogue.

Hardy is a good enough writer that I still liked the book overall and am glad I read it.

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LibraryThing member bookworm12

Damn this man can write tragedy! In this novel Hardy createsa love triangle (quadrangle?) that is both beautiful and disastrous. Using his incrediblegift for lyrical prose he takes us into the wild land of Egdon Health.

Diggory Venn, a local reddleman, is in love with ThomasinYeobright. She in turn

is in love with Wildeve, a restless self-centered man.He is torn between his feelings for her and his love for Eustacia Vye. Add Thomasin’scousin Clym Yeobright, the man who catches Eustacia’s eye, to the mix and you’vegot quite the quandary.

Each of the characters is wonderfully developed. We feelEustacia’s restlessness and Thomasin’s earnest devotion. We long for Venn tofind love and Clym to find happiness. We watch their lives unfold with a mix ofapprehension and excitement, wondering all the while if the characters arefalling in love purely for the escape they offer each other or if theirfeelings are true. Do they want something because someone else wants it orbecause it’s truly their heart’s desire?

“The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animatenature – that of not desiring the undesired of other – was lively as a passionin the supsersublte epicurean heart of Eustacia.”

I loved how the health is one of the main characters in thebook and all of the characters are shaped by their reaction to it. Eustaciadesperately wants to leave it and will do anything to get away. Clym returnsfrom Parisaching for the wild health he loved so much in his childhood. Thomasin feelsthat she is a country girl and is comfortable living in the health. Only Hardycould make the background setting of a drama such a definitive character in theaction. He even describes the effect the health has on the women who live there…

“An environment which would have made a contented woman apoet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy womanthoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.”

SPOILERS

All of the characters desperately want what they can’t have.Another person, money, success, peace, travel, etc. Even Clym’s mother Mrs.Yeobright longs for different partners for her son and niece. She wants theirhappiness, but when they’ve chosen their lot in life she has such a hard timeaccepting it that she perpetuates unhappiness in their lives. Each character isdestroyed by their own longing except for Venn. Early in the book he comes toterms with the fact that he’ll never have the woman he truly wants. He acceptsthat and decides that he’ll do everything he can to make her happy from adistance. Then, in the end he’s the only one who ends up getting what he wanted.It’s a beautiful picture of selfless love.

SPOILERS OVER

BOTTOM LINE: This book is so beautiful and poignant I justcan’t get over it. It’s definitely a new favorite of mine. I’d recommend it ifyou enjoy Victorian literature, tragic love stories or just gorgeous prose.

“Love was to her theone cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.”

“Humanity appears upon the scene, hand-in-hand withtrouble.”

“What a strange sort of love to be entirely free from thatquality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passionand sometimes its only one.”

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LibraryThing member branful

What　I cannot agree with this novel is most of the important actions in this novel are detemined by the unconfirmed presumptions (by Eustacia, Clym and Mrs Yeobright). No characters in the book or the unconfirmed presumptions (by Eustacia, Clym and Mrs Yeobright). No characters in the book or thE

narrator try to rectify this error. This is unacceptable and deprives the basic sympathy narrator try to rectify this error. This is unacceptable and deprives the basic sympathy toward this book from me.
On the other hand, I am charmed by the good prose and the right words. In this head, HardThemots just.y is much better than Austin or Forster.
I should like to admit that I am rather sympathetic with Wildeve. Although he was not loyal to Eustacia through and through, his indecision was understandable and eventually, he proved to be faithful at heart to Eustacia. That is a comparative feat, and as much as possible for an average man.

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LibraryThing member JVioland

This novel haunts me with its characters and settings. Excellent in every way.

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