Recommendations
Books Like The Return of the Native
Best books to read after The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native is Hardy at his most architecturally rigorous — the wild Egdon Heath as antagonist, Eustacia Vye's passion as a force too large for the world that contains her, and the classical tragic structure Hardy learned from Shakespeare and the Greeks. If the novel's tragic beauty and Hardy's Wessex landscape moved you, these books share its portrait of passionate natures in conflict with unyielding circumstance.
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most romantic and accessible novel — Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors; typically recommended as the best entry point to Hardy's Wessex series, and the novel that best shows the world before Hardy's tragic vision darkens; reading it before The Return of the Native gives the clearest picture of what Hardy promises before he takes it away
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most famous novel — a young woman destroyed by the sexual double standard that condemns her for what was done to her; the most explicit of Hardy's feminist arguments and the Wessex novel most widely read; where The Return of the Native presents tragedy as the collision of passionate nature with indifferent circumstance, Tess presents it as society's specific crime
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's most Shakespearean novel — Michael Henchard, who sells his wife while drunk and spends his life trying to recover from it; the closest parallel to The Return of the Native in its classical tragic structure, its portrait of a powerful protagonist undone by character flaws and circumstance
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Brontë's portrait of Heathcliff and Catherine — a passion so absolute it cannot accommodate social life — is the Victorian novel most tonally similar to The Return of the Native; Egdon Heath and Brontë's Yorkshire moors are kindred landscapes, ancient and indifferent, perfectly suited to the passions they contain
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The European parallel — a woman whose passionate nature cannot be contained by the social structures available to her; both Anna Karenina and Eustacia Vye are destroyed by the gap between their emotional nature and the social world's requirements, and both are presented with the full sympathy their authors can manage without excusing the choices that destroy them
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Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's novella about a man trapped by circumstance in a New England farm life that promises nothing — the American parallel to Hardy's Wessex tragedies in its portrait of passion suppressed by poverty, duty, and rural isolation; brief, perfectly constructed, and devastating in a way that recalls Hardy's economy in The Return of the Native
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's darkest novel and his final work of fiction — Jude Fawley, who aspires to the university and is destroyed by the combined weight of class, marriage law, and his own passionate nature; the culmination of Hardy's tragic vision and the novel he wrote after The Return of the Native convinced him that the novel form could bear the full weight of his argument
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's masterpiece about frustrated ambition in a provincial English town — the most sympathetic and psychologically penetrating portrait of people who want more than their world will give them in Victorian fiction; where Hardy's protagonists are destroyed by their world, Eliot's survive (or don't) in ways that feel more psychologically realistic and less structurally predetermined; the essential companion to Hardy in any survey of Victorian tragedy
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