Recommendations
Books Like The Return of the Native
Best books to read after The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Readers who love The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy are drawn to its combination of the most classical structure in Hardy's Wessex novels (the unities of time and place, a year on Egdon Heath), the grandeur of Egdon Heath as character, and Eustacia Vye as one of the most fully realized tragic heroines in Victorian fiction. They want works that deal with the passionate woman destroyed by the gap between her romantic imagination and her actual circumstances, the Wessex pastoral tragedy, and the Hardy canon organized around the same brooding sense of fate.
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
The companion predecessor — Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors. The companion as the optimistic pastoral version of the same investigation: where Far from the Madding Crowd allows a resolution, The Return of the Native is the tragic version of the same Wessex world
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
The companion — Tess's tragedy. The companion as the fullest statement of the same theme: the beautiful passionate woman destroyed by the intersection of her nature and the social world's merciless judgment
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
The companion — Michael Henchard's self-destruction. The companion investigation of the same tragic inevitability but organized around a man's willful self-destruction rather than a woman's entrapment
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The companion — Emma Bovary trapped in provincial France, wanting Paris. The companion as the French predecessor: Eustacia Vye and Emma Bovary are companion figures — both provincial women of passionate temperament destroyed by the gap between their romantic imagination and their actual circumstances
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Hedda Gabler
by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's companion — Hedda's trapped idealism. The companion as the dramatic version: Hedda Gabler and Eustacia Vye are companion figures — both women of exceptional temperament trapped in marriages and social situations that cannot contain them, and both who choose a form of death over capitulation
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Brontë's companion investigation of the passionate romantic temperament and the landscape that expresses it. Egdon Heath and the Yorkshire moors are companion landscapes — both express the same romantic excess and both serve as the environment in which tragic passion becomes inevitable
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's companion final novel — Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead. The companion as the most radical and modern statement of the same investigation: where The Return of the Native investigates the woman destroyed by the social world's demand, Jude investigates the man and the woman together, who both understand the forces that destroy them
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's companion — Anna's marriage and her love for Vronsky. The companion as the Russian investigation of the same theme: Anna and Eustacia are companion figures — both women of extraordinary vitality destroyed by the combination of their own passionate natures and the societies that cannot accommodate them
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