Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for `music, poetry, passion, war`. She marries Clym Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

Early readers responded to Hardy`s `insatiably observant` descriptions of the heath, a setting that for D. H. Lawrence provided the `real stuff of tragedy`. For modern readers, the tension between the mythic setting of the heath and the modernity of the characters challenges our freedom to shape the world as we wish; like Eustacia, we may not always be able to live our dreams.

This edition has a critically established text based on the manuscript and first edition, and without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy`s original intentions.