The Return of the Native (The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written)
Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1978. Parker, Agnes Miller. Reissue. Full-Leather. Very Good / No Jacket. Item #2285599
Endpaper edges faded.
416 pp. 8vo. Grey full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Includes publisher's preface, How This Book Came to Be by John T. Winterich, and illustrations from wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker. 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.
Price: $25.00