Books like The Return of the Native
A Paris diamond merchant returns to Egdon Heath to become a schoolteacher, and his marriage to a restless woman who longs to escape the heath ends in tragedy.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Return of the Native
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Drunk at a country fair, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor, and years later, when he has become the respected mayor of Casterbridge, his past comes back to him.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl in Victorian Wessex, is sent to claim kinship with a rich family and is wronged by its son, and the world goes on punishing her for it.
Middlemarch
An idealistic young woman in 1830s provincial England marries a dry old scholar, and her story intertwines with a doctor's ruinous marriage and the whole web of a town on the eve of reform.
The Mill on the Floss
A young woman's passionate nature collides with provincial convention in mid-Victorian England, and the cost of being too much for your world is devastating.
Anna Karenina
A married aristocrat's affair with a dashing officer unravels her life, her family, and her sanity against the backdrop of Russian high society.
Madame Bovary
A provincial doctor's wife in mid-nineteenth-century France drowns in romantic fantasies, debt, and affairs, and her destruction exposes the poison of bourgeois aspiration.
The Forsyte Saga
Three novels following the Forsytes, a wealthy London family of the late Victorian age, beginning with Soames, a solicitor who treats his beautiful wife Irene as one more of his possessions.
Ethan Frome
A visiting engineer pieces together the story of Ethan Frome, a farmer in a bleak Massachusetts village, his sickly, suspicious wife and her young cousin who came to help keep house.
After the Divorce
When Costantino is sentenced to prison for a murder he didn't commit, his wife Giovanna, under a new law allowing divorce, takes a richer husband in their Sardinian village.
Jamaica Inn
An orphaned young woman travels to a desolate Cornish inn where her aunt's husband runs something far worse than a tavern.
The Portrait of a Lady
A young American woman in 1870s Europe navigates suitors, social codes, and the trap of a marriage that looks like freedom but feels like a prison.
A Handful of Dust
A contented English squire devoted to his Gothic country house loses his wife to an idle young social climber, and his life comes apart all the way to the Amazon.