One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native
centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D.
H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing
face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers,
and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who
comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin;
her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the
protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and
melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar
throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the
course of a life.
As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was "committed
to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy,
even hostility, toward man."