{"product_id":"the-return-of-the-native-isbn-9780679417309","title":"The Return of the Native","description":"\u003cp\u003eEustacia Vye longs to escape from Egdon Heath, but the man she chooses to save her longs to stay. Out of their struggle, the unfulfilled passion of his heroine, and the daily rhythms of late-nineteenth-century rural life, Hardy builds a drama fully worthy of the magnificent stage on which he places it. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Return of the Native\u003c\/i\u003e is dominated by the brooding presence of Egdon Heath, located in Thomas Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, and in no other book did Hardy’s extraordinary feeling for landscape blend so perfectly with his austere, stoic vision of human fate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce more he treats his favorite theme of the mismatched couple with masterly pathos and understatement.\u003c\/p\u003e“Most of Hardy’s novels, and particularly the early ones, have a Shakespearean power of creating a unique world and climate of being . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Return of the Native\u003c\/i\u003e is . . . thoughtful, valedictory, poetic, tinged with the somberness of an uncertainty which seems to well up from the depths of the author’s own subconscious . . . Hardy’s sense of the tragic life of human beings, mere small fragments of consciousness in a vast uncaring universe, comes directly from his own youthful awareness of the place and circumstances described in the novel.” –from the Introduction by John BayleyTHOMAS HARDY, whose writings immortalized the Wessex countryside and dramatized his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life, was born near Egdon Heath in Dorset in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonemason.  As a youth he trained as an architect and in 1862 obtained a post in London.  During this time he began seriously to write poetry, which remained his first literary love and his last.  In 1867-68, his first novel was refused publication, but \u003ci\u003eUnder the Greenwood Tree\u003c\/i\u003e (1872), his first Wessex novel, did well enough to convince him to continue writing.  In 1874, \u003ci\u003eFar from the Madding Crowd\u003c\/i\u003e, published serially and anonymously in the \u003ci\u003eCornhill Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, became a great success.  Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874, and in 1875 they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life.  There he wrote \u003ci\u003eThe Return of the Native\u003c\/i\u003e (1878), \u003ci\u003eThe Mayor of Casterbridge\u003c\/i\u003e (1886), \u003ci\u003eTess of the d’Urbervilles\u003c\/i\u003e (1891), and \u003ci\u003eJude the Obscure \u003c\/i\u003e(1895).  With \u003ci\u003eTess\u003c\/i\u003e, Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the “infidelity” and “obscenity” of this great novel he had subtitled “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.”  \u003ci\u003eJude the Obscure\u003c\/i\u003e aroused even greater indignation and was denounced as pornography.  Hardy’s disgust at the reaction to \u003ci\u003eJude\u003c\/i\u003e led him to announce in 1896 that he would never write fiction again.  He published \u003ci\u003eWessex Poems\u003c\/i\u003e in 1898, \u003ci\u003ePoems of the Past and Present\u003c\/i\u003e in 1901, and from 1903 to 1908, \u003ci\u003eThe Dynasts\u003c\/i\u003e, a huge drama in which Hardy’s conception of the Immanent Will, implicit in the tragic novels, is most clearly stated.  In 1912, Hardy’s wife, Emma, died.  The marriage was childless and had long been a troubled one, but in the years after her death, Hardy memorialized her in several poems.  At seventy-four, he married his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale, herself a writer of children’s books and articles, with whom he lived happily until his death in 1928.  His heart was buried in the Wessex countryside; his ashes were placed next to Charles Dickens’s in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The heaven being spread with this pallid screen  and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was  clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of  night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness  had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking   upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down,  he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world  and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter.  The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could  in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely  generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking  dread. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness  the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said  to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt  when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this  and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its  true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed  itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades  and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the  evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens  precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed  together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The place  became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to  sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form  seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries,  through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one  last crisis—the final overthrow.","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300235038949,"sku":"NP9780679417309","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679417309.jpg?v=1742919237","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-return-of-the-native-isbn-9780679417309","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}