As an afterthought for the Wessex Edition of The Return of the Native (1878; 1912), Hardy tells readers that his “original conception” of the story did not include its happy ending, its wedding, or its transformations of character and circumstance:

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 whither – Thomasin remaining a widow. But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent. Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent one to be the true one.