How setting influences plot in Hardy

Thomas Hardy does know how to build a scene and a story - as I move along in Return of the Native - which near the beginning has the very long scene of the village dwellers gathered around a bonfire on the hilltop at night, scaring one another with talk of the supernatural and the dangers of living alone or crossing the heath at night alone - one man in particular, an effeminate guy who laments that nobody will marry him (and is treated very kindly and sympathetically by the other villagers, btw - great to see a 19th-century novelist have such an advanced sensibility and not to be condescending toward the working class and the farm laborers) is particularly nervous. Out of the darkness the "reddleman" - peddler of sheep dye who is himself died to a reddish hue and looks in the firelight like the devil incarnate - emerges and asks for directions; as we see him a chapter or so later, he turns out to be not so frightening but a kind soul who's given refuge to a young woman, Tasmin, who had left the village that day to get married - she has returned to her aunt, with whom she lives, in the back of his cart: something went wrong with the marriage and we're not sure what, but it appears she was about to marry the "wrong guy" because we also learn from the villagers' conversation that someone who'd been in love with her was also en route back to the little village - he will be, we suspect, the native who is returning - and Hardy is building us toward a classic love-triangle plot, perhaps influenced to an extent by Wuthering Heights? His accomplishment in these opening chapters is building the potentially romantic-melodramatic plot within an atmosphere that is highly charged and well-suited to these intense emotions: the darkness, the bonfires on the hilltops, the meeting of mysterious strangers, the dangers and mysteries of the heath with its narrow trails and steep descents, the sense of loneliness and isolation of each farmhouse and dwelling. As noted yesterday, Hardy is the most geographic of writers; this story line, if told in another setting - as it has been, of course - say in London or in a thriving, sunlit village - would be completely different not only in tone but also in substance: part of the intensity of the emotions has to do with the isolation of each family and each life - there are few opportunities for life-decisions, so every choice, every relationship, has it seems much more profound and potentially more dreadful consequences.