The Return of the Native

Eustacia Vye, restless and openly contemptuous of the isolated moorland where she lives, dreams of a life somewhere else entirely and fixes her hopes first on Damon Wildeve, an innkeeper she does not really love, and then on Clym Yeobright, a native son of Egdon Heath who has just returned from managing a diamond merchant's business in Paris meaning to become a schoolmaster there. Clym and Eustacia marry, but Clym's mother never accepts the match, and on a hot day Eustacia, busy hiding a visit from Wildeve, fails to answer the door in time when Mrs Yeobright calls; believing herself deliberately shut out, the older woman turns back for the long walk home and dies that night from an adder's bite compounded by heat exhaustion, a death that leaves Clym convinced the fault was Eustacia's. Diggory Venn, a reddleman who trades in the red dye used for marking sheep and who has loved Clym's cousin Thomasin since before the novel begins, spends the whole book quietly protecting her interests without ever pressing his own case. Eustacia, desperate to escape the heath by any means left to her, drowns in the Shadwater Weir attempting to flee with Wildeve, who dies alongside her trying to save her from the water. Clym, broken by his wife's death and his mother's, becomes an itinerant open air preacher, alone on the heath he once left and returned to; Venn, in the ending Hardy added for serial readers, becomes a prosperous dairy farmer and finally marries Thomasin.

Hardy sets the entire novel within sight of Egdon Heath itself, an ancient, largely unchanging expanse that several critics have called the book's real leading character, and he builds the story with the compressed unity of time, place, and action of a classical tragedy, the heath standing in for the chorus that watches and comments on the human action. It is a bleak, deliberately paced book, and Hardy noted himself that his original ending left Clym alone rather than granting Venn and Thomasin their marriage, a change made under pressure from serial readers who wanted at least one happy resolution.