A Study Guide for Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839259

Book preview

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The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy

1878

Introduction

The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth novel and probably his best known. In fact, many critics assert that Eustacia Vye is one of the most memorable characters in English literature. The story focuses on the lives and loves of residents in the fictional county of Wessex, England, an area which was based on the rural area where Hardy was raised.

When the book was published in 1878, it met with mixed reviews. Some commentators praised Hardy's vivid descriptions of the geographical landscapes, especially those in the first chapter. Others felt that his portrayal of the local characters was shallow and unconvincing. Yet other critics objected to the sexual relationships in the novel. The charge that he wrote about sexual relationships purely for sensationalism hurt Hardy to such a degree that he quit writing novels by 1895, although he continued to live another thirty-three years.

Author Biography

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, in Dorsetshire, England, on July 2, 1840. His father and grandfather were master masons, and it was expected that he would be one also; but as a young man he excelled in his academic studies, learning Latin and Greek and studying poetry. At age sixteen, he left school to be an apprentice architect in nearby Dorchester.

In 1862, he moved to London to work with a noted architect. It was then that he started writing in his spare time. His first love was poetry, but he had trouble getting his work published. In 1868 he returned to Dorset as an architect. He began writing novels, publishing the first one, Desperate Remedies, in 1871. The three novels that he wrote over the next three years were successful, so that after publishing Far From the Madding Crowd in serial form in 1874, he was able to quit architecture.

Hardy's work met with commercial and critical success. However, starting with The Return of the Native in 1878, Hardy's fiction began to gain a reputation for its salacious treatment of sexual relationships. When Tess of the D'Urbervilles was published in book form in 1891, he included scenes that had been cut out of the magazine