Picture Copyright: Sew Many Books
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (1878)
What is it about?
The heart of the story is a complex ‘love pentagon’ which develops in the remote landscape of Egdon Heath. Diggory Venn, a reddleman, or a dealer in red ochre dye for marking sheep, is in love with Thomasin Yeobright. Thomasin is about to be married to inn-keeper Damon Wildeve but Damon is in an emotional entanglement with Eustacia Vye, who has recently come to the heath from the bright lights of the Budmouth. The native who returns is Clym Yeobright, Thomasin’s cousin, who is dissatisfied with the glamour of working in the jewellery business in Paris and wants a simpler, more fulfilling life. The heath is a paradise of sorts, full of apples and snakes: the question is whether Clym can ever truly return to his former contented self. Hardy also presents the heath as a repository of ancient ways and folk customs that are passing out of memory. Can industrializing England itself every truly return to this former, innocent state?
What did I think about it?
It did take a little while to get going, but gradually the rich picture of the world of the heath drew me in and I appreciated spending time there. The story is paced well and I became emotionally involved in the lives of these five young people and also Clym’s mother, who plays a pivotal role in proceedings. The characters are finely drawn and feel real, with the possible exception of Diggory, although they are not always easy to empathise with.
Is there any needlework in it?
Women stay in to do needlework – the elder Mrs Yeobright is at her work-table during lonely hours; Thomasin plans to stay in to work on her baby’s clothes. Diggory Venn mends his own stockings. Eustacia can turn her hand to adjusting costumes for a mummers’ play.
Inspiration for textile art
The idea of a paradise with apple and serpent imagery could make an interesting design. There are richly described scenes of village events: dancing in moonlight - “the players appeared only in outline against the sky; except when the circular mouths of the trombone, ophicliede and French horn gleamed out like huge eyes from the shade of their figures. The pretty dresses of the maids lost their subtler day colours and showed more or less a misty white”; or the raising of the maypole - “At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small white flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of maybloom; then a zone of blue-bells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils and so on, till the lowest stage was reached”. Other vividly described pictures include Thomasin in the loft picking out apples packed in fern, or a dice game played by the light of a lantern. It is hard, however, to resist the images of the heath itself, the “heathy, furzy, briary wilderness” which is described though all its seasonal changes. I was particularly struck by the emphasis on insects: butterflies, moths, bees, ants and grasshoppers. My design is based on ferns and furze and includes the “strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced” and the suitably ominous death’s-head moth.
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