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The Return of the Native (Modern Library Classics)
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Manufacturer: Modern Library
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Modern Library
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Our Price: $8.95
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Author: Thomas Hardy
Publisher: Modern Library
Average Customer Rating:
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The Return of the Native (Modern Library Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780375757181
ISBN: 037575718X
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 448
Publication Date: 2001-02-13
Publisher: Modern Library
Product Release Date: 2001-02-13
Studio: Modern Library
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780375757181
ISBN: 037575718X
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 448
Publication Date: 2001-02-13
Publisher: Modern Library
Product Release Date: 2001-02-13
Studio: Modern Library
Editorial Review of The Return of the Native (Modern Library Classics)
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."
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."
Customer Reviews of The Return of the Native (Modern Library Classics)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Return of the Native is a reader's return to the joys found in Hardy's Wessex
Review: The Return of the Native is a great Victorian novel. It's author is Thomas Hardy who published the book serially in 1878 prior to book publication. The main characters whose live are interwoved into a tragedy of Greek proportions are:
1. Clyde Yeobright-He is the Wessex native who returns from his career as a jeweler in Paris. Clym returns to the bleak landscape of Egdon Heath to be plummeted into a maelstrom of passion, sex, suffering and deceit.
2. Eustace Vye-The sexy daughter of a bandsmaster in Budmouth (real name-Weymouth) she is a seductress who dreams of a life of luxury. Eustace will marry Clym; run away with Wildeve and die in a tragic manner. Whether her death is a suicide or accident is not stated. Eustace joins Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bathsheba Everdene and other memorable femme fatales creates by Hardy's agile pen.
3. Thomasin Yeobright-She is the young cousin of Clym. She falls in love with Wildeve, marries him and bears the former engineer/present innkeeper a baby. As the novel ends she weds the reddleman Gregory Venn. She is a an uncomplicated woman who is a pale version of Eustace Vye.
4. Wildeve-A failed engineer he operates an inn. Though Wildeve loves Eustace he marries Thomasin. He will later leave Thomasin to run away with his true love Eustace. He will drown alongside his paramour.
5. Mrs. Yeobright-The bright, strong and virtuous mother of Clym who hates his marriage to Eustace Vye. She dies when Eustace refuses to open the door to let her into the Yeobright's home. Mrs. Yeobright is, probably, modeled on Hardy's own mother.
6. Gregory Venn-He is a reddleman (one who provides paint to shepherds who mark the sheep in their flocks) who is in love with Thomasin. He enjoys spying on the main characters. As the novel ends he is a respectable dairy farmer.
The characters are often compared to insects or animals who must exist in a godless world controlled by the uncaring fates. Coincidence and irony are used in the complicated plot. Hardy's vision is dark and forbidding.
This Hardy classic includes his usual close attention to the lives of the common people; descriptive pages on nature and criticisms of animal cruelty.
Perhaps the greatest character in the novel is Egdon Heath. Human characters love, suffer and die but it lasts forever.
Thomas Hardy is one of the best English novels along with such luminaries as Dickens, Eliot, Austen and Trollope. It is always a pleasure to read and reread his words.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Return of the Native
Review: The book has been reviewed extensively. It is a modern classic and should be read. You will enjoy it. More important, the buying experience through Amazon was as expected. The books arrived earlier than I expected, in pristine, brand new, condition. What more could you ask for?
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An opera of a book
Review: I read this novel when I was living in Japan. There were no English books avaliable where I was living but a motley collection of classics in the local library.
I found the book somewhat long and slow but loved the language and character desciptions, for example Hardy decribes the main female character Eustacia Vye as "Queen of the night whose passions and instincts would make a model goddess but not quite a model woman" with "pagan eyes, full of noctural mysteries. It is a opera of a book, long and slow but with moments of great beauty
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Eustacia and the Heath: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Review: Yes, the Heath is the centerpiece, but no more than Eustacia, for they are mirrors of one another, by turns cold and aloof, brooding, mysterious, somewhat wild, tempestuous, and a place where at times man must tread carefully. Some are inexorably drawn to the contours, shades and subtleties of Egdon Heath (Mother Earth) while others seek shelter from its periodic wrath. So, too, the people of the Heath seem divided about their Earth Mother, Eustacia - reading the worst into her or - in the case of many of its men - hoping against hope that the vagaries of nature will look favorably upon them.
This is the most descriptive portrayal of both woman and nature that I have ever read.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: absorbing atmosphere
Review: This is the 1st Thomas Hardy novel I picked up and one of his most visually striking; in that, you can see and feel the environment in which the characters live. The landscape here both traps and releases the people inside it. Eustacia is one of Hardy's best heroines, vulnerable and cunning within minutes. And part of the Hardy pattern where tragedy invades before the end of the story; tragedy, as he writes it, that is often accidental rather than forced. (the forced tragedy usually follows the accidental one.) Clym and Damon may be the 2 main sources of Eustacia's downfall, but she brings on her own fate, so to speak, by remaining disillusioned with where she is. Key other players bissect the main characters in equally helpful and not so helpful ways. The main "character" still remains Edgon Heath, the harsh, often beautiful setting, where everyone is almost destined to be doomed...
Review Summary: The Return of the Native is a reader's return to the joys found in Hardy's Wessex
Review: The Return of the Native is a great Victorian novel. It's author is Thomas Hardy who published the book serially in 1878 prior to book publication. The main characters whose live are interwoved into a tragedy of Greek proportions are:
1. Clyde Yeobright-He is the Wessex native who returns from his career as a jeweler in Paris. Clym returns to the bleak landscape of Egdon Heath to be plummeted into a maelstrom of passion, sex, suffering and deceit.
2. Eustace Vye-The sexy daughter of a bandsmaster in Budmouth (real name-Weymouth) she is a seductress who dreams of a life of luxury. Eustace will marry Clym; run away with Wildeve and die in a tragic manner. Whether her death is a suicide or accident is not stated. Eustace joins Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bathsheba Everdene and other memorable femme fatales creates by Hardy's agile pen.
3. Thomasin Yeobright-She is the young cousin of Clym. She falls in love with Wildeve, marries him and bears the former engineer/present innkeeper a baby. As the novel ends she weds the reddleman Gregory Venn. She is a an uncomplicated woman who is a pale version of Eustace Vye.
4. Wildeve-A failed engineer he operates an inn. Though Wildeve loves Eustace he marries Thomasin. He will later leave Thomasin to run away with his true love Eustace. He will drown alongside his paramour.
5. Mrs. Yeobright-The bright, strong and virtuous mother of Clym who hates his marriage to Eustace Vye. She dies when Eustace refuses to open the door to let her into the Yeobright's home. Mrs. Yeobright is, probably, modeled on Hardy's own mother.
6. Gregory Venn-He is a reddleman (one who provides paint to shepherds who mark the sheep in their flocks) who is in love with Thomasin. He enjoys spying on the main characters. As the novel ends he is a respectable dairy farmer.
The characters are often compared to insects or animals who must exist in a godless world controlled by the uncaring fates. Coincidence and irony are used in the complicated plot. Hardy's vision is dark and forbidding.
This Hardy classic includes his usual close attention to the lives of the common people; descriptive pages on nature and criticisms of animal cruelty.
Perhaps the greatest character in the novel is Egdon Heath. Human characters love, suffer and die but it lasts forever.
Thomas Hardy is one of the best English novels along with such luminaries as Dickens, Eliot, Austen and Trollope. It is always a pleasure to read and reread his words.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Return of the Native
Review: The book has been reviewed extensively. It is a modern classic and should be read. You will enjoy it. More important, the buying experience through Amazon was as expected. The books arrived earlier than I expected, in pristine, brand new, condition. What more could you ask for?
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An opera of a book
Review: I read this novel when I was living in Japan. There were no English books avaliable where I was living but a motley collection of classics in the local library.
I found the book somewhat long and slow but loved the language and character desciptions, for example Hardy decribes the main female character Eustacia Vye as "Queen of the night whose passions and instincts would make a model goddess but not quite a model woman" with "pagan eyes, full of noctural mysteries. It is a opera of a book, long and slow but with moments of great beauty
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Eustacia and the Heath: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Review: Yes, the Heath is the centerpiece, but no more than Eustacia, for they are mirrors of one another, by turns cold and aloof, brooding, mysterious, somewhat wild, tempestuous, and a place where at times man must tread carefully. Some are inexorably drawn to the contours, shades and subtleties of Egdon Heath (Mother Earth) while others seek shelter from its periodic wrath. So, too, the people of the Heath seem divided about their Earth Mother, Eustacia - reading the worst into her or - in the case of many of its men - hoping against hope that the vagaries of nature will look favorably upon them.
This is the most descriptive portrayal of both woman and nature that I have ever read.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: absorbing atmosphere
Review: This is the 1st Thomas Hardy novel I picked up and one of his most visually striking; in that, you can see and feel the environment in which the characters live. The landscape here both traps and releases the people inside it. Eustacia is one of Hardy's best heroines, vulnerable and cunning within minutes. And part of the Hardy pattern where tragedy invades before the end of the story; tragedy, as he writes it, that is often accidental rather than forced. (the forced tragedy usually follows the accidental one.) Clym and Damon may be the 2 main sources of Eustacia's downfall, but she brings on her own fate, so to speak, by remaining disillusioned with where she is. Key other players bissect the main characters in equally helpful and not so helpful ways. The main "character" still remains Edgon Heath, the harsh, often beautiful setting, where everyone is almost destined to be doomed...