The postponement of Wildeve and Thomasin’s wedding creates other intrigues elsewhere too. I think when I become calm after your woundings, “Do I embrace a cloud of common fog after all?” You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. ‘Why did I try to recall you? Damon, a strange warring takes place in my mind occasionally. ‘This is the pleasure I have won by my trouble,’ she whispered bitterly, half to herself. Nevertheless, Eustacia decides to let Wildeve go. Wildeve even suggests to Eustacia that they could run off together to America. For Wildeve, his fiancé Thomasin Yeobright is a pleasant and good-natured girl from a wealthy family but she has none of the fire of raven-haired Eustacia to excite him. The prospect that he may be able to provide the life she craves is not good and he is a little below her social class. But Wildeve is a failed engineer who now keeps a local inn. The prospect of losing Wildeve forever has the effect of rekindling Eustacia’s interest in him and, when a bureaucratic bungle postpones the wedding, she decides to consider Wildeve one last time.

He has since become engaged to marry another woman. Damon Wildeve was once Eustacia’s lover before she turned her back on him. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow, and not factiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in her with years. Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and stifled warmth within her. Egdon was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto. Her power was limited and the consciousness of this limitation had biased her development. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.īut celestial imperiousness, love, wrath and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. Her motive for her impressive bonfire is certainly witchy she hopes it will summon her former lover.Įustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. Locals are unsure what to make of Eustacia intelligent, vain, pretentious, some even suspect her of being a witch. She hates the slow, quiet life on the heath and yearns for the glamour and sophistication of big cities of London and Paris. Eustacia grew up in a nearby town but, following the deaths of her parents, has since had to live on her grandfather’s estate on the heath. One burning particularly impressively is Eustacia Vye’s bonfire. One November 5th in 1840’s rural England, several bonfires are lit across the undulating hills and valleys of Egdon Heath to mark Guy Fawkes.

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