Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Return of the Native
    Unavailable
    Return of the Native
    Unavailable
    Return of the Native
    Ebook533 pages8 hours

    Return of the Native

    By Thomas Hardy

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. It first appeared in the magazine Belgravia, a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly installments from January to December 1878.

    Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason and jobbing builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an isolated cottage on the edge of open heathland. Though he was often ill as a child, his early experience of rural life, with its seasonal rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing. He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to schools in Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good grounding in mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, and in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday, he moved to London and became a draftsman in the busy office of Arthur Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to Dorset by ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth architect G.R. Crickmay.

    Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest. His habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic skills. 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.

    In 1867–68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which was sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never published. George Meredith, as a publisher’s reader, 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. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own father shortly before Hardy’s own birth.

    In March 1870 Hardy had been sent to make an architectural assessment of the lonely and dilapidated Church of St. Juliot in Cornwall. There—in romantic circumstances later poignantly recalled in prose and verse—he first met the rector’s vivacious sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who became his wife four years later. She actively encouraged and assisted him in his literary endeavours, and his next novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), drew heavily upon the circumstances of their courtship for its wild Cornish setting and its melodramatic story of a young woman (somewhat resembling Emma Gifford) and the two men, friends become rivals, who successively pursue, misunderstand, and fail her.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLighthouse Books for Translation and Publishing
    Release dateAug 22, 2019
    ISBN9780599315426
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840, the eldest of four children. At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice architect. With remarkable self discipline he developed his classical education by studying between the hours of four and eight in the morning. With encouragement from Horace Moule of Queens' College Cambridge, he began to write fiction. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Thus began a series of increasingly dark novels all set within the rural landscape of his native Dorset, called Wessex in the novels. Such was the success of his early novels, including A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing. However he had difficulty in getting Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) published and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1894) prompted Hardy to abandon novel writing altogether. He concentrated mainly on poetry in his latter years. He died in January 1928 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; but his heart, in a separate casket, was buried in Stinsford, Dorset.

    Read more from Thomas Hardy

    Related to Return of the Native

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Exceeding Expectations

      Nov 23, 2023

      Charles Dickens did not come from a privileged background, but nor were his parents without prospects. John Dickens (1785-1851), was the son of servants to the Crewe family - Cheshire gentry with a townhouse in Mayfair - whose patronage secured him a

      5 min read

    • Article

      Victorian Authors

      Mar 21, 2024

      Victorian Authors
      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetic Licence

      May 20, 2022

      Poetic Licence
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Man That Time Forgot

      Apr 8, 2023

      1880s portrait, fromIn 1926, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid described Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) as ‘potentially the greatest Scotsman of his generation’, and a year later, the Sunday Post commented: ‘There are few men nowadays so well k

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Wessex novelist

      Feb 16, 2022

      Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), the son of a stone mason, first trained as an architect. Moving to London in 1862, he worked for Arthur Blomfield, a distinguished Victorian architect noted for his churches. Back in his native Dorset by 1867, Hardy's first

      1 min read

    • Article

      My Favorite Unpublished Books

      Sep 1, 2023

      My Favorite Unpublished Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      Theodore Dreiser’s New York

      Oct 26, 2017

      Theodore Dreiser’s New York
      8 min read

    • Article

      Elizabeth Gaskell: A Voice Of The Victorians

      Jul 7, 2022

      Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s journey to becoming one of the most celebrated authors of the Victorian age was borne from an intensely difficult time in her life. In 1845, she lost her infant son to scarlet fever and, at her husband’s encouragement, tu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Elizabeth Gaskell: A Voice Of The Victorians

      Jul 7, 2022

      Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s journey to becoming one of the most celebrated authors of the Victorian age was borne from an intensely difficult time in her life. In 1845, she lost her infant son to scarlet fever and, at her husband’s encouragement, tu

      3 min read

    • Article

      De La Mare Revisited PAUL DEAN Reading Walter De La Mare

      Jun 30, 2021

      Faber £14.99 At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there. De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of

      2 min read

    • Article

      The ‘Female Byron’

      Mar 3, 2019

      The ‘Female Byron’
      7 min read

    • Article

      Willa Cather, Pioneer

      Feb 27, 2018

      Willa Cather, Pioneer
      10 min read

    • Article

      What A Long, Strange Trip It Was

      Jun 1, 2022

      Born in 1890, Jean Rhys (christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams) lived through two world wars and in her long life observed firsthand the many changes wrought by the 20th century. She consorted with the literati of the Lost Generation in 1920s Pari

      6 min read

    • Article

      Far From the Madding Crowd

      Feb 16, 2022

      Far From the Madding Crowd
      2 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of Beauty

      Jan 5, 2022

      In Search Of Beauty
      6 min read

    • Article

      Dante’s Blessed Damozels

      Sep 22, 2021

      Dante’s Blessed Damozels
      5 min read

    • Article

      Where The Wych Elm Grows

      Jun 24, 2020

      A SMALL boy stood beside a large, overhanging tree in a Hertfordshire garden in the 1880s. According to folklore, if pigs’ teeth were found in a tree’s trunk, chewing a small piece of its bark could cure toothache. This wych elm, with its few embedde

      4 min read

    • Article

      Forgotten Authors

      Sep 21, 2022

      Forty years ago, Hermann Hesse was everywhere. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated into 60 languages, his timeless stories were popular all around the world. And then he disappeared. I read him avidly in my teens and then forgot al

      3 min read

    • Article

      Royal Rhymes

      Oct 7, 2022

      Royal Rhymes
      5 min read

    • Article

      Finding Facts In Fiction

      Mar 12, 2021

      Finding Facts In Fiction
      10 min read

    • Article

      Courage Summoned

      Aug 1, 2021

      Author James Courage doesn’t get half the attention he deserves these days, which is quite surprising given the present zeitgeist’s relentless search for LGBTQIA heroes and recognition of the black dog of depression. There was a flurry of interest in

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Uses of Laughter

      Aug 11, 2021

      The Uses of Laughter
      19 min read

    Reviews for Return of the Native

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words