ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Egdon Heath is a fictitious area of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex inhabited sparsely by the people who cut the furze (gorse) that grows there. The entire action of Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native takes place on Egdon Heath, and it also features in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the short story The Withered Arm (1888).

Detailed explanation-2: -The story of the novel is set against the somber rural background of Egdon Heath, and embodies the tragedy engulfing the life of several of its characters. Clym Yeobright, the native of Egdon Heath, returns from Paris, where he has been engaged in business as a jeweler and diamond-merchant.

Detailed explanation-3: -Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native is all-pervasive and it holds the action of the novel and its characters as though in the hollow of its hand. It is an extended image of the nature of which man is part, in which he is caught, which conditions his very being, and which cares nothing for him.

Detailed explanation-4: -It is “neither ghastly hateful nor ugly, neither commonplace, unmeaning nor tame, but slighted and enduring”. In a way, Egdon is Hardy’s habitual personification of nature.