A haunting tale of romantic self-deception, The Return of the Nativefocuses on mismatched lovers who see in each other only what they want to see, and decidedly not what is actually there. Clym Yeobright, the native of the title, returns to Hardy??s fictional Egdon Heath determined to be a force for social progress. Dazzled by […]
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Rosemarie Morgan with Shannon Russell.
From its spectacular opening??the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair??to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy??s finest and most powerful novels. Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling […]
Hardys masterpiece traces a poor stonemasons ill-fated romance with his free-spirited cousin. No Victorian institution is spared — marriage, religion, education — and the outrage following publication led the embittered author to renounce fiction. Modern critics hail this novel as a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought.