Hardy, the son of a builder, was born in Dorset and began his career as an architect, but his first novel (Desperate Remedies) was published in 1871 and he was soon earning far more from his fiction than from his architecture. Books like Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far From the Madding Crowd followed and established his reputation. The Return of the Native, like nearly all of Hardy's novels, is set in Wessex, his disguised version of the West Country in which he grew up. The native of the title is Clym Yeobright, a Wessex man who has been living in Paris, and the place to which he returns is the wild landscape of Egdon Heath. There he marries the passionate and restless Eustacia Vye who dreams of a world beyond the Heath and imagines that Clym might take her to it. He, however, is happy to have returned to his native land and to be close to his widowed mother and he has no intention of leaving again. He has his own plans for the future. In despair, and with her dreams of escaping the Heath apparently dashed forever, Eustacia again takes up with an old lover, Damon Wildeve, who has married Clym's cousin, Thomasin. One night, when she is in her house with Wildeve, Eustacia refuses entry to Clym's mother and, as a consequence, is the inadvertent cause of her death. Eustacia and Clym separate and the scene is set for a tragic climax as she and Wildeve plan, one stormy night, to escape the Heath. The Return of the Native is one of Hardy's most powerful novels - a compelling narrative in which the brooding presence of Egdon Heath hangs over all the characters, seeming to force them into the fates that await them.

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