Biography:
An English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, who powerfully delineated characters, portrayed in his native Dorset, struggling helplessly against their passions and external circumstances, Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, June 2, 1840, and educated in local schools and later privately.

His father, a stonemason, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in restoring old churches. From 1862 to 1867 Hardy worked for an architect in London and later continued to practice architecture, despite ill health, in Dorset.  While in London Hardy wrote poems and to submitted them to editors, who  uniformly returned them; decades later, with some revisions, he would publish many of these poems in his volumes of verse. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form in later volumes (e.g., “Neutral Tones,” “Retty's Phases”), but when none of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly turned to prose.

He then turned to novels as more salable, and in 1867 he began to write a novel, a social satire calledThe Poor Man and the Lady. It was rejected in turn by Alexander Macmillan, of his family's firm, and by George Meredith, the distinguished novelist, who was a reader for Chapman and Hall; both were nonetheless encouraging of Hardy's talent. He abandoned the book, eventually burning the manuscript.  Meredith had advised Hardy to write a more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the contemporary “sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much more distinctively his own.  An invitation to contribute a serial to the prestigious Cornhill Magazine resulted in the novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which introduced Wessex for the first time and made Hardy famous by its agricultural settings and its distinctive blend of humorous, melodramatic, pastoral, and tragic elements. This is also the year that Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1912, which prompted Hardy to write his collection of poems called Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame). These poems are some of Hardy's finest and describe their meeting and his subsequent loss.

Over the next twenty years, Hardy published another ten novels. Many of them contain memorable characters and striking descriptive passages, and three of them are acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of English fiction: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), perhaps his finest novel, which describes in shatteringly tragic terms the rise and ruin of a strong but fatally impulsive man; Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), whose frank presentation of a trusting young woman's ruination by the men in her life caused the serial publication to be "mutilated," in Hardy's term, and drew outcries from reviewers for its presumed immorality and the unrelenting bleakness of its vision; and Jude the Obscure (1896), a dark and pessimistic novel that is his most controversial work, through whose tormented protagonist Hardy explores issues of idealism and human weakness, and questions the strictures of traditional morality. Painful to read, it is impossible to forget.

All are pervaded by a belief in a universe dominated by the determinism of the biology of Charles Darwin and the physics of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Occasionally the determined fate of the individual is altered by chance, but the human will loses when it challenges necessity. Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Wessex attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the fortunes of the characters. These fortunes Hardy views with irony and sadness.

The critic G. K. Chesterton wrote that Hardy "became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." In Victorian England, Hardy did indeed seem a blasphemer, particularly in Jude, which treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Criticism of Jude was so harsh that Hardy announced he was "cured" of writing novels, but the reality appears to be somewhat more complex. There is no doubt that he was offended by the attacks upon him, but he had always regarded novel-writing essentially as a profession, one which, like any other occupation, could be confining as well as fulfilling. Thus, in the opinion of many, the adverse reaction to Jude was essentially an impetus for a decision that Hardy was secure enough financially and more than ready psychologically to make.  He was settled in his personal circumstances and liberated from the pressures of earning a living, and could turn his full attention to what had been his first and was still his greatest enthusiasm, poetry.

Hardy's poetry also explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition.  A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with an extraordinary variety of meters and stanzaic forms.  A significant influence on later poets (including Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased during the course of the century, offering an alternative--more down-to-earth, less rhetorical--to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of Yeats. Thomas Hardy died in 1928.

During his lifetime, Hardy published 14 novels, nearly 50 short stories, a 3-volume epic, and nearly 1000 poems. Approximately one half of Hardy's sixty-year literary career was devoted to the novel. From 1871 until 1897, Hardy wrote fifteen novels, fourteen of which were published.

A Hardy "lifeline" can be found through the Thoms Hardy Resource Library or through the Thomas Hardy Association.  And more extensive biographies can be found at Literature On-Line and the Classical Authors Directory.

Background:
Like most of Hardy's novels, Return of the Native is considered a "regional novel."  Although Hardy identifies the area as "Wessex," in reality, it is a interpretative picture of his native Dorset.  In Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is a composite of several stretches of heathland, most prominently Puddletown Heath, which backs right to the Hardy Birthplace. Heath is rolling  soil. Bracken fern and gorse, or furze, with  its yellow flowers and sharp spines, are  acid-lovers, and thus two floral markers of  heathland. Puddletown Heath, which was open land during Hardy's time, has become heavily forested.  

Although Cornhill Magazine rejected The Return of The Native as possibly too racy for a "'family magazine'" (Purdy 27), the novel was serialized in Belgravia from January to December, 1878. Smith,
Elder published the first three-volume edition in November of that year.

Electronic sources:
The novel can be found on-line at Masterbooks, the Electronic Literature Foundation, and Project Guttenburg. There are a few sites that investigate specific aspects of Return of the Native, such as folkplay or irony. There is also a group that has set up a "talking to the author" site which is interesting. For multi-purpose sites, you might want to consider the Thomas Hardy Association, Mark Simon's Thomas Hardy Resource Library, and Thomas Hardy's World--all three are excellent.  The Thomas Hardy Society of Japan has links to several useful resources, as does the Thomas Hardy section of the Victorian Web, and the Thomas Hardy Miscellany.

Study Questions:
As you read Return of the Native and think about the novel, here are some helpful hints to move you from just summarizing the text to analyzing what it is all about.  If you understand these issues, you have a very good understanding of the novel.

Look at Hardy's description of the heath (chapter 1).  How does he anthropormorphize it?  Why would he do so?  What is the effect on the reader?  How might the description function in terms of regionalism?

What is the significance/symbolism of the bonfire?

What is Diggory Venn's role in the novel?

The description of Eustacia Vye in chapter 7 is well known.  In particular, note the type of imagery and the allusions used.  What is Hardy trying to accomplish?  How does this affect our perception of Eustacia?

In April 1878, Hardy wrote in his notebook:  "--Note.  A Plot, or Tragedy, should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation that comes of ordinary human passions, prejudices, and ambitions, by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events produced by said passions, prejudices, and ambitions."  How do we see this idea realized in Return of the Native?  Who is the tragic figure who has not bothered to ward off disaster?  What are the passions, prejudices, and ambitions?  Do you see this novel as a tragedy?  If so, consider the next set of questions.

Is this novel like a Greek tragedy, a work where the plot is unwound through a trail of human errors?  Do you see any similarities to the story of Oedipus?

Hardy also wrote (journal entry fro 19 April 1885), "The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things."  Can you apply this philosophy to Return of the Native?  Where?

It has been said that Return of the Native is "the forerunner of the twentieth-century psychological novel--poetic, compassionate, vivid in its associations, universal in its meanings."  Do you agree?  Why?