Thomas Hardy published The Return of the Native in 1878. Egdon Heath in Dorset, described at length before a single character appears, as though the landscape itself is a protagonist, is the setting for a drama of mismatched ambitions and desires. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris, where he worked in the diamond trade, determined to establish a local school and educate the heath people. He marries Eustacia Vye, a beautiful woman who wanted to use him as a passage back to Paris and the sophisticated world she imagines there. Both are disappointed in each other and in themselves. Wildeve, who was attached to Eustacia before Clym's return, is married to Thomasin Yeobright, Clym's cousin, but has not released his attachment to Eustacia.
Eustacia is the novel's most fully realized figure, a woman of real intelligence and genuine romantic imagination trapped in a rural backwater that has nothing to offer her except the romantic projections she makes onto men who cannot sustain them. Her tragedy is not that she loves badly; it is that she lives in a place where the conditions for the life she wants to live do not exist, and every attempt to create those conditions through personal relationship fails because Wildeve and Clym are different inadequate substitutes for the same unavailable reality. Hardy treats her with consistent sympathy even as he charts her destruction.
The novel is a sustained meditation on the relationship between ambition and environment, on what happens to people whose desires cannot be satisfied by the circumstances they were born into and cannot practically escape. Hardy's landscape is not romantic backdrop; Egdon Heath actively resists the human projects played out on it. Reading the opening description of the heath, which Hardy spends several pages establishing as prehistoric and indifferent before introducing a single human character, one understands that this is a novel about the scale at which human aspiration operates, and how small that scale is against the geological patience of the landscape.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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