The Return of the Native, published in 1878, is a novel by Thomas Hardy that unfolds in Egdon Heath,

where passions and conflicts entwine the lives of the locals. The narrative follows Eustacia Vye’s
tumultuous romantic choices, including her love for Damon Wildeve and Clym Yeobright. Amidst the
heath’s unforgiving landscape, the novel explores themes of destiny, love, and societal constraints.
Hardy’s evocative prose and vivid characters create a tragic tale that delves into the complexities of
human relationships and the relentless forces of fate.

Characters List

Clym Yeobright The “Native” of the novel’s title, Clym is the son of Mrs. Yeobright and the cousin of
Thomasin Yeobright. He goes abroad to work as a diamond merchant in Paris, but comes home when he
realizes that his ambition is not towards material wealth. He is pursued by Eustacia Vye, and eventually
marries her, but their marriage turns sour when her ambition to move to Paris conflicts with his plan to
stay on Egdon Heath and teach school. Clym is intelligent, cultured and deeply introspective. He is
patient and generous, but also deeply determined, and fierce when angered: it is this determination that
leads to his eventual split with his mother, and separation from Eustacia. At the end of the novel,
weakened by a degenerative eye condition and by the trauma of losing his mother and Eustacia—for
whose deaths he blames himself—he becomes an itinerant preacher, sermonizing about simple moral
topics.

Diggory Venn Throughout most of the novel, Venn works as a semi-nomadic “reddleman”: he travels
throughout the region selling the dye that farmers use to mark their sheep. As a consequence of his
exposure to the dye, his entire body and everything he owns are dyed red. Entirely red, camping out on
the heath in his wagon, and emerging mysteriously from time to time, Venn functions as an image of the
heath incarnated. He watches over Thomasin Yeobright’s interests throughout the novel, but also
preserves his own interests: he has long been in love with her, and at the end of the novel they marry.
Venn is very clever and insightful, and can be a devious schemer.

Eustacia Vye Born in the busy port town of Budmouth and transplanted to Egdon Heath to live with her
grandfather, Eustacia despises the heath, and searches for a way to escape. However, even as she hates
the heath, Eustacia seems in her deep, brooding passion, to be a part of its wild nature. She has an
amorous relationship with Damon Wildeve, but enters into a tragic marriage with Clym Yeobright when
she realizes that he is the more interesting, and urbane, of the two men.

Damon Wildeve A local innkeeper, Damon is described as a “lady-killer.” At the start of the novel, he puts
off his marriage to Thomasin Yeobright in order to pursue a relationship with the woman he truly wants,
Eustacia Vye; when he is jilted by Eustacia, however, he marries Thomasin, and has a daughter with her.
He drowns at the end of the novel just before making an escape with Eustacia. He is interested
throughout in possession rather than love.

Thomasin Yeobright Clym Yeobright’s cousin and Mrs. Yeobright’s niece and ward. Thomasin is an
innocent and goodhearted, if somewhat vacuous, woman who seems genuinely to care for Damon
Wildeve—who, however, is merely using her to make Eustacia Vye jealous. She eventually marries
Wildeve—over the objections of her aunt—and has a child, which she names Eustacia. At the end of the
novel, she marries Diggory Venn, who has long loved her.
Mrs. Yeobright Clym Yeobright’s mother, and Thomasin Yeobright’s aunt and guardian. A proper, class-
conscious, proud woman, Mrs. Yeobright objects to the marriage of both her charges; as it turns out, she
is entirely correct. She dies when, exhausted, she is bitten by an adder on the heath, believing that Clym
has utterly rejected her. The daughter of a parson, Mrs. Yeobright considers herself—and is considered—
of a higher class than the local laborers.

Christian Cantle An awkward, superstitious young man who works for Mrs. Yeobright. Christian provides
comic relief throughout the novel with his dolorous over-certainty that he will never marry and his petty
phobias. He fails in his mission to bring Thomasin her inheritance, thus contributing to the degeneration
of the family relationships.

Captain Vye Eustacia’s grandfather and guardian, a former captain in the British navy. A reclusive and
silent man.

Johnny Nonsuch The son of Susan Nonsuch. The boy has the knack of being in the right place at the right
time: he reports Eustacia and Damon Wildeve’s tryst to Diggory Venn, and is also the one who tells Clym
Yeobright of his mother’s damning last words.

Charley A local youth who works for the Vyes, and who falls hopelessly in love with Eustacia.

Local laborers Local laborers whose simple dialect and observance of local customs form the cultural
backdrop for the novel.

Thomas Hardy and The Return of the Native Background

Thomas Hardy’s long literary career witnessed and encompassed the most important artistic and literary
changes of the modern era. Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorcester, England; before his death in 1928 at
the age of 87, the genre of the Victorian novel had flowered and faded, and the erstwhile avant-garde
movement known as modernism dominated the English literary landscape. In his ornate, wordy style and
his sensitivity to issues of class, Hardy seemed a characteristic Victorian novelist. But his writing
increasingly revealed a sensibility and a moral code that seemed to discard the strict Victorian social and
sexual mores, and that tended towards atheism and subjective morality rather than an absolutist
Christianity. His philosophy was out of place in Victorian England, and presaged the coming social and
cultural upheaval of modernism.

Trained as an architect, Hardy was at first unsuccessful in breaking through in the London literary world.
His first poems and novels went unpublished or unappreciated. It was only after Hardy’s return to his
native Bockhampton that his novels began to attract attention and commercial success. Far from the
Madding Crowd, published in 1874, ushered in his most productive period; it was soon followed by many
other novels, including The Return of the Native—published serially in monthly installments in an English
magazine—in 1878. Controversy over the moral stance of his later novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
and Jude the Obscure (1896) led Hardy to abandon writing novels, and to concentrate on poems and—to
a lesser extent—short stories, for which he also won deserved fame.

It Is not at all coincidental that Hardy’s success as a novelist followed his return home to Dorcester.
Setting is of crucial importance in Hardy’s novels, and his finest novels are all set in the region of
“Wessex,” which, while fictional, is based upon Hardy’s own native corner of England. Wessex follows
the geographical contours of Dorset, England, with only a few changes made by Hardy: it is not hard to
see how the culture, language and geography of Hardy’s home country shape his novels. The Return of
the Native takes as one of its central themes—and, arguably, as its central character—the tract of
windswept upland in Hardy’s Wessex known as Egdon Heath. The novel is deeply rooted in the folk
customs of the residents of the Heath, and attempts to imitate their attitudes and even their patterns of
speech. It is the return to the heath of the educated Clym Yeobright that supplies the novel’s title and
catalyzing crisis. This surely derives from the experience of Thomas Hardy himself, who only a few years
before the publication of the novel made his own return to his native country.