The Return of the Native

Across this gashed and puckered mirror a dark body was slowly borne by one of the backward currents. "O, my darling!" exclaimed Wildeve in an agonized voice; and, without showing sufficient presence of mind even to throw off his greatcoat, he leaped into the boiling caldron.

Eustacia's flight, Mrs Yeobright's death, and the Shadwater Weir drowning form a tragedy of mismatched desire on Egdon Heath with classical inevitability, so plot scores 88.

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.

Eustacia, Clym, Venn, Thomasin, and Wildeve are typed but warmly individuated — the queen of night against the reddleman and the returning native — without flattening into allegory only, so cast scores 89.

They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration. Some were distant, and stood in a dense atmosphere, so that bundles of pale straw-like beams radiated around them in the shape of a fan.

Six books with long atmospheric passages between the bonfire opening and the weir catastrophe; the heath's seasonal rhythm slows the plot to tragic inevitability rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 82.

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

Hardy's Egdon prose — twilight embrowning the heath, bonfires on the horizon, the weir pool at night — fuses landscape and moral condition into lyric fatalism, so prose scores 91.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time.

Egdon Heath — Rainbarrow, Shadwater Weir, Blooms-End, the Quiet Woman — is topographically precise and morally charged; the heath is not backdrop but protagonist, so world scores 94.

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.

Book First's November twilight and the heath bonfires establish Eustacia's world of thwarted grandeur before Clym's return — inviting in atmosphere rather than shock, so hook scores 85.

Nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn.

The heath as tragic stage and Eustacia as a classical heroine trapped in rural obscurity anticipates modernist landscape fiction, so innov scores 86.

"No. To look for a glove that was dropped by one of the maidens." Thomasin was speechless with surprise. That a man who had to walk some four or five miles to his home should wait here for such a reason pointed to only one conclusion—the man must be amazingly interested in that glove's owner.

Thomasin marries Venn after the Maypole glove scene; Clym becomes an itinerant preacher on Rainbarrow — morally generous closure for survivors, bleak vocation for the native, so ending scores 87.