Description
“HIS GREATEST WORK OF FICTION”: EXTRAORDINARILY RARE SIGNED FIRST EDITION OF HARDY’S MASTERPIECE RETURN OF THE NATIVE
HARDY, Thomas. The Return of the Native. London: Smith, Elder, 1878. Three volumes. Octavo, original brown cloth. Housed in custom chemises and half morocco slipcase.
Scarce first edition in book form of Hardy’s attack on Victorian hypocrisy—what some hail as “his greatest work of fiction.” This copy in beautiful original cloth, complete with the frontispiece map (not always present), boldly signed by Thomas Hardy on the verso of the half title in Volume I.
In The Return of the Native, Hardy aimed to portray “if not exactly ‘the Bovary type,’ then a woman who was of what ‘English opinion’ would have called ‘the adulterous class.’ That is to say, he wanted to depict a woman who would have no qualms about committing adultery. He was both fascinated and repelled by the pious hypocrisy of the Victorians, and was determined to upset it… Hardy was one of the keenest, most persistent and, indeed, earliest explorers of what can be termed real morality” (Seymour-Smith, 229, 231). Although initially rejected by Hardy’s editor and poorly received by critics—many of whom disapproved of the author’s “dangerous tendency to depict women as fully human” (Seymour-Smith, 239)—The Return of the Native “in its balance and control is his greatest work of fiction” (Baugh, et al., 1466). “The first edition of The Return of the Native was the final product of nearly two years of creation and re-creation. Hardy probably began writing the novel at the end of 1876; the writing was stalled in the spring of 1877 as, in his struggles to find an editor who would accept the story as a serial, he decided to recast the narrative completely; and the last chapters were not completed until March 1878, by which time the first three serial episodes had been published in Belgravia. Throughout 1878 Hardy revised the proofs of the serial episodes, and in the late summer also began reconsidering the novel as a complete thing in preparation for its publication in three volumes. Thus when Smith, Elder issued the first edition several weeks in advance of the novel’s last episode in the December 1878 issue of Belgravia, it appeared as the culmination of a continuous process of writing” (Simon Gatrell). Purdy reports two versions of Smith-Elder bindings for the first edition, one with a double-rule border in blind on the backs and the other with a triple-rule border, as on the present copy. The latter binding is rarer, and the frontispiece is “almost invariably lacking” in sets with this binding. Here the frontispiece, a map drawn by the author himself and separately printed, is present. Webb, 11-13. An English Library, 27. From the library of renowned collector of 19th-century English literature J. Insley Blair, with her small morocco booklabel.
Extremities only very slightly rubbed. A beautiful, exceptionally fine copy, most rare and desirable signed by Hardy.
