The story in one page
Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to Egdon Heath, trading diamonds for a plan to educate the local furze-cutters. This idealism clashes with Eustacia Vye, a local beauty who views the heath as a cage and Clym as her ticket to French high society. Their marriage is a collision of incompatible dreams, further complicated by Clym’s disapproving mother and a persistent ex-lover in a red van. When Clym’s vision fails from over-study, he takes up a manual laborer's hook, shattering Eustacia’s social ambitions. A sequence of accidental slights leads to his mother's death and a fatal midnight flight through a storm.
Who's who
- Clym Yeobright
A former jeweler who seeks a simple life of teaching.
- Eustacia Vye
A romantic dreamer who hates the heath and craves excitement.
- Mrs. Yeobright
Clym’s proud mother who deeply distrusts her son's choices.
- Diggory Venn
A traveling reddleman who stoically protects his former love.
- Damon Wildeve
An unsettled innkeeper caught between two different women.
- Egdon Heath
An ancient, untameable landscape that dictates the characters' fates.
What it's really about
- Isolation
- The physical and social solitude of the vast, unchanging heath.
- Miscommunication
- Letters and doors remaining closed lead to irreversible family tragedies.
Why it's memorable
- A woman standing alone on a prehistoric burial mound against the twilight sky.
- Clym cutting furze in his leather gear while his wife watches her dreams vanish.
The ending, explained
Spoilers — show the ending
After the drowning of Eustacia and Wildeve, Clym becomes a wandering preacher, delivering moral lectures from the top of Rainbarrow to anyone who will listen.
For your book club
- Is Clym’s return to the heath an act of nobility or selfish shortsightedness?
- How does the physical landscape act as a character that punishes those who hate it?