Thomas Hardy Wessex Novels Reading Order

About Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels are among the most powerful tragedies in English fiction — stories of passionate, intelligent people destroyed by the gap between their inner lives and the social world that refuses to accommodate them. The Return of the Native (1878), set on the brooding Egdon Heath, is Hardy's most architecturally perfect novel and the fullest expression of his tragic vision: Eustacia Vye, who wants to escape the heath, and Clym Yeobright, who returns to it, in irreversible collision.