The Return of the Native

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.  Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds, rugs and carpets were unendurable.  The leaves of the hollyhocks hung like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors.  A small apple tree, of the sort called Ratheripe, grew just inside the gate, the only one which throve in the garden, by reason of the lightness of the soil; and among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878)

One of the difficulties of The Return of the Native is that there is no character who can easily carry the reader's sympathies, and the narrator, also, seems cold and remote.
Jane Smiley, Introduction, (Signet 1999)

I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up.  I like that Eustacia Vye.
Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951).


I guess there are reasons these days not to read Thomas Hardy:  he is too modern for those who like the more traditional Victorian writers and too Victorian for those who like more modern writers; he is too full of classical references (Homer, Sappho) and uses words that to many are obscure (contumely, supercilious) about times and places that are distant.  To this I would simply say that there is much we can learn about the classics and there is much we can all do to expand our vocabularies.  One of the first characters who appears in The Return of the Native is a "reddleman" and fortunately my wife Susan knows a sheep farmer in England who was able to explain what that is.  But ultimately these are minor quibbles (and, in my case, reasons for reading the book!) about a book that is full of wonderful characters and observations and emotions that are more relevant than ever.  Hardy is a great writer whom  I loved when I was a teenager for his insights into relationships and small communities and whom I enjoy even more now, as I re-read him, for also his appreciation of children and the influences of nature, beautiful and harsh.   Unlike Jane Smiley (quoted above) I have much sympathy indeed for Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yeobright, Damon Wildeve, Diggory Venn and all the other characters in The Return of the Native, for their very human combinations of aspirations and self-deceptions, as well as their abilities to love and care.