The Return of the Native | Techniques
Venn and Thomasin's wedding resolves the love plot and permits Hardy to move Clym forward into a career as an open-air preacher on progressive subjects, both social and religious. In his 1912 definitive edition of the novel, however, Hardy added this somewhat irascible postscript to the third chapter of "Aftercourses": "the writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn. He was to have retained his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing...
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