Reading Order
Thomas HardyThomas Hardy Wessex Novels Reading Order Reading Order
Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) is set on the wild and ancient Egdon Heath — Hardy's most famous landscape, 'a place perfectly accordant with man's nature,' as he describes it at the novel's opening. The story of Eustacia Vye, who wants to escape the heath and reach Paris; Clym Yeobright, the native who returns from Paris to teach; and Damon Wildeve, the innkeeper who loves the wrong woman, is Hardy's most architecturally perfect novel and the fullest expression of his tragic vision of human desire in conflict with circumstance.
Where to start
The Return of the Native
Complete Thomas Hardy Book List
- 1Buy
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy·1878·Start here — often considered Hardy's most structurally perfect novel; the conflict between Eustacia Vye's passionate nature and the unyielding heath is one of the most powerful expressions of Hardy's tragic vision. - 2Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy·1874·Hardy's most romantic and accessible novel — Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors; the most hopeful of Hardy's Wessex novels and typically recommended as the best entry point to the series. - 3Buy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy·1891·Hardy's most famous and polemical novel — a young country woman destroyed by the sexual double standard; where The Return of the Native presents tragedy as the intersection of character and circumstance, Tess presents it as society's specific crime against women. - 4Buy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy·1886·Hardy's most Shakespearean novel — Michael Henchard, who sells his wife while drunk and spends his life trying to recover from it; read after The Return of the Native for the most complete picture of Hardy's tragic worldview. - 5Buy
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy·1895·Hardy's darkest and final novel — his most explicit critique of marriage and higher education as Victorian institutions; the novel that caused such scandal it convinced Hardy to abandon fiction and return to poetry.
Thomas Hardy — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Hardy novel to start with?
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is almost universally recommended as the best entry point — it's Hardy's most romantic and accessible major novel, and its relatively hopeful conclusion makes it easier to approach than the later tragedies. The Return of the Native is the better novel for readers who want Hardy's full tragic power from the start and don't mind a more demanding narrative structure.
Is The Return of the Native based on a real place?
Egdon Heath is fictional, but it draws on the heath landscape of Dorset in Hardy's Wessex — the fictional county he created as the setting for all his major novels. Hardy grew up in Dorset, and his intimate knowledge of the landscape, the dialect, and the traditional rural culture of the region gives all the Wessex novels their specific gravity. Egdon Heath is at once a real landscape and a symbolic one — ancient, dark, indifferent to human desire.
What is the tragedy in The Return of the Native?
The tragedy is generated by the incompatibility of passionate natures with the circumstances they inhabit. Eustacia Vye is too large for the heath; Clym Yeobright is too idealistic for the world; Wildeve is too weak for the passion he inspires. Hardy structures the novel around their collision, and the heath — ancient, indifferent, outlasting them all — is both setting and antagonist: the force that will not accommodate their desire for something beyond what is available.
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