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    The Return of the Native
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    The Return of the Native
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    The Return of the Native
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    The Return of the Native

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Steven Pacey

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor Steven Pacey.

    'Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world?'

    Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath. Hearing that Clym Yeobright is to return from Paris, she sets her heart on marrying him, believing that through him she can leave rural life and find fulfilment elsewhere. But she is to be disappointed, for Clym has dreams of his own, and they have little in common with Eustacia's. Their unhappy marriage causes havoc in the lives of those close to them, in particular Damon Wildeve, Eustacia's former lover, Clym's mother and his cousin Thomasin. The Retun of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.

    Part of a series of vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin UK Audio
    Release dateAug 30, 2012
    ISBN9780718198541
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), which was denounced as morally objectionable. Hardy, disgusted with this reaction, declared he would never write fiction again and devoted the rest of his literary career to poetry.

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    Reviews for The Return of the Native

    4/5

    19 ratings19 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Damn this man can write tragedy! In this novel Hardy createsa love triangle (quadrangle?) that is both beautiful and disastrous. Using his incrediblegift for lyrical prose he takes us into the wild land of Egdon Health.Diggory Venn, a local reddleman, is in love with ThomasinYeobright. She in turn is in love with Wildeve, a restless self-centered man.He is torn between his feelings for her and his love for Eustacia Vye. Add Thomasin’scousin Clym Yeobright, the man who catches Eustacia’s eye, to the mix and you’vegot quite the quandary. Each of the characters is wonderfully developed. We feelEustacia’s restlessness and Thomasin’s earnest devotion. We long for Venn tofind love and Clym to find happiness. We watch their lives unfold with a mix ofapprehension and excitement, wondering all the while if the characters arefalling in love purely for the escape they offer each other or if theirfeelings are true. Do they want something because someone else wants it orbecause it’s truly their heart’s desire?“The sentiment which lurks more or less in all animatenature – that of not desiring the undesired of other – was lively as a passionin the supsersublte epicurean heart of Eustacia.”I loved how the health is one of the main characters in thebook and all of the characters are shaped by their reaction to it. Eustaciadesperately wants to leave it and will do anything to get away. Clym returnsfrom Parisaching for the wild health he loved so much in his childhood. Thomasin feelsthat she is a country girl and is comfortable living in the health. Only Hardycould make the background setting of a drama such a definitive character in theaction. He even describes the effect the health has on the women who live there…“An environment which would have made a contented woman apoet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy womanthoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.”SPOILERS All of the characters desperately want what they can’t have.Another person, money, success, peace, travel, etc. Even Clym’s mother Mrs.Yeobright longs for different partners for her son and niece. She wants theirhappiness, but when they’ve chosen their lot in life she has such a hard timeaccepting it that she perpetuates unhappiness in their lives. Each character isdestroyed by their own longing except for Venn. Early in the book he comes toterms with the fact that he’ll never have the woman he truly wants. He acceptsthat and decides that he’ll do everything he can to make her happy from adistance. Then, in the end he’s the only one who ends up getting what he wanted.It’s a beautiful picture of selfless love. SPOILERS OVERBOTTOM LINE: This book is so beautiful and poignant I justcan’t get over it. It’s definitely a new favorite of mine. I’d recommend it ifyou enjoy Victorian literature, tragic love stories or just gorgeous prose. “Love was to her theone cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.” “Humanity appears upon the scene, hand-in-hand withtrouble.” “What a strange sort of love to be entirely free from thatquality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passionand sometimes its only one.”  
    • 5/5
      This is the 6th book that Thomas Hardy wrote and published. For the reading group we have read all the previous ones and I feel like Hardy finally reached his full capacity in this book. It has all the hallmarks that those persons who have only read one or two of his better-known works would recognize.This book is set entirely in the fictitious (but based upon real moorland) Egdon Heath, a sparsely settled and remote area of Wessex. Many of the inhabitants farm or cut furze for a living. Some are of a more upperclass stratum such as the grandfather of Eustacia, Captain Vye, and the mother of Clym, Mrs. Yeobright. As such they have higher aspirations for their offspring than to marry someone from the Heath. Mrs. Yeobright's inclinations also extend to her niece, Thomasin. However, Thomasin (or Tamsin as she is sometimes called) has fallen in love with the innkeeper Wildeve. Mrs. Yeobright at first protested at the banns but she has finally agreed the marriage can take place. So, on the morning of Guy Fawkes day, Thomasin and Wildeve set off to a nearby church to get married. Much to Thomasin's disappointment the wedding cannot take place because the licence was obtained in another township. She has fled from Wildeve and stumbled upon Diggory Venn, who was a former suitor. Diggory is a reddleman which is a person who sells reddle, a type of red ochre, to sheep farmers. He lives out of a small caravan and it and himself and everything he owns is stained red. They arrive home just as the bonfires from Guy Fawkes are dwindling. Thomasin and her aunt just want to escape back home but first the locals come to sing to the, as they thought, newlyweds.Meanwhile, Eustacia has set her own bonfire burning hoping to attract Wildeve who was her lover before he took up with Thomasin. Eustacia has the reputation as a witch and it does seem that she has bewitched Wildeve. He turns up at the bonfire and it is clear that he cares a great deal for Eustacia. The question then arises will he proceed with his plan to marry Thomasin or will he return to Eustacia?During the rest of the book, which takes place in exactly a year and a day, proposals, betrothals, weddings and even a birth take place but who with whom should probably be left to the next reader. As with most Thomas Hardy there is tragedy but there is also a righting of wrongs.Egdon Heath does sound wild and rugged but some of its inhabitants love it. Hardy is the master of describing places and I wish that I could transport myself back in time to experience this place. I think I would find beauty in the furze and other vegetation. I know that the birds and beasts would be wonderful.Hardy is also a master of characterization. The minor characters like Grandfer Cantle, Susan Nonsuch and Charley add to the story. Of the major characters my favourite is Diggory and that certainly is my favourite name. I suspect he might have been Hardy's favourite as well.
    • 4/5
      The Return of the Native is simply a fictional marvel; moving me as a teenager as much as it did as an adult. Its characters are so rich, yet none so omnipresent and foreboding as the Heath itself, which pervades the lives of all of the book's characters. I don't often give 5stars, but just thinking about this makes me want to read it again.
    • 4/5
      A sad but interesting story. The story includes several tragic characters of which several die. Thomas Hardy twines an interesting set of relationships and personalities in the story. He is an excellent author and I highly recommend his writings.
    • 5/5
      Eustacia Vye lives with her grandfather on Hardy’s famous Egdon Heath, suffering its loneliness by waiting for rescue in a state of undirected passion. At first attracted to the unavailability of the formerly attentive Wildeve, she next clings to the arrival of Clym Yeobright, who falls in love with and marries her; but her notion of rescue involves leaving the heath far behind, and Clym means to stay; and, as this is Thomas Hardy, events tend tragedy-wards.It took me an inordinately long to time to get around to listening to this; my lassitude was caused in part by being bitten by Tess of the D’Urbervilles at an early age, and in part by not being sure whether I’d want to read along, or just listen (I don’t often ‘read’ by audiobook, and the experience wasn’t something I imagined I’d enjoy without a book in hand as well). As it turns out, all one can do is listen; Alan Rickman’s voice is tyrannical in its insistence on absolute devotion of attention.I was hooked from word one… what rapturously bleak descriptions of the heath-land Hardy embarks upon, and my own inner voice would have done it scant justice; if the entire book had simply been Mr. Rickman vocalising Hardy’s lyrical rural scenic creation, I wouldn’t have cared, even though once he began to bring the voices of characters alive I was captured anew. Then the plot begins to emerge, people move about and Mr. Rickman slips gracefully into the background and lets the story do its work... the story is a grand mixture of the unfortunate, the desperate, the hysterical, the passive and the hopeful that I have met in Hardy’s other works; his plots, while readable, are secondary to the description, as with no other writer but each of the characters in The Return of the Native inspire pity and interest in the listener.I have no idea if the experience of simply reading The Return of the Native would have moved me to a five-star rating; I only know that this edition of the book, with its sublime marriage of writing and reading, has absolutely captivated me for hours on end.
    • 5/5
      2007, BBC Audiobooks, Read by Alan RickmanThe Return of the Native, set exclusively on Egdon Heath, opens with reddleman Diggory Venn transporting home a naïve, disgraced Thomasin Yeobright, who was to have married innkeeper Damon Wildeve, earlier in the day. Wildeve, we soon learn, is preoccupied with the novel’s heroine, Eustasia Vye, undoubtedly one of literature’s great characters. Eustasia is intelligent, devious, passionate, and a manipulative object of desire – I did not find her likeable, but she was completely enthralling. Believing herself superior, she detests life on the Heath, and in this vein, she sets out in self-serving pursuit of Clym Yeobright, the “native,” who has just returned to Egdon from Paris, where he has been living a prosperous life as a diamond merchant. Twists of fate thwart even the best laid plans, of course, and the characters are inexorably entwined in complex relationships which Eustacia’s ambition has set in motion.Hardy’s language is beautifully mellifluous; the novel’s narrative is richly layered, read in many voices. Themes include the celebration of the pagan, the primitive, and the pastoral. Hardy glorifies the simplicity of life for the working classes and celebrates the pastoral for its superiority. Egdon Heath is a character in its own right; Clym experiences perfect harmony with nature when he goes to work cutting furze:“Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod. The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down. Tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskillful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding of their old skins, when their colours are brightest. Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen.” (Bk 4, Ch 2)The Return of the Native is timeless, the mark of a true classic for me. I cannot say enough about Alan Rickman’s accomplishment as narrator. Sublime! Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Jan 16, 1965: As Winston Churchill lies dying, I have finsihed re-reading Hardy's Return of the Native. I last finished reading it Nov 24, 1946, and my sole comment in my diary re the book at that time: "I didn't like it." This is the most astonishing thing, since this time I was tremendously impressed. That I could pass off so negatively such an impassioned impressivel-constructed novel is quite a revelation. I liked Eustacia Vye (Iam always amused by Hardy's women's names: Bathsheba, Lucretia. Eustacia, Thomasin) and regretted her death, altho of course Damon Wildeve was a most non-sympathy-arousing figure, and his death bothered me not at all. And I did like Diggory Venn and was happy to see him marry Thomasin, rather than Clym Yeobright doing so, toward whom i felt nothing, It seemed to me he was wrong to pay so little attention to Eustacia's wishes--he was pig-headed. I reconize the description of Egdon Heath as masterpiecey, altho I was not so impressed as some. How I would like to go to Wessex and especially Egdon Heath, to retrace all these things. But then, I suppose, when and if I get there, I'll have forgotten all of the stories and the scenes and sites will mean much less. However one would think enterprising Wessex-ers would have prepared a guidebook which would contain appropriate selections from Hardy.
    • 3/5
      Hardy's wife has been quoted as saying that, for all the memorable female characters he created, Hardy knew nothing about real women. I can believe that. Though I enjoyed this book, it plays out like a variation on Far From the Madding Crowd, with another woman, Eustacia Vye, who suffers and causes others to suffer, yet doesn't seem to act in a psychologically consistent or realistic way. As in Madding Crowd, the most sympathetic character gets some happiness in the end, but no one else does. Physical descriptions are gorgeous.
    • 2/5
      The eloquence and grandeur of Hardy's writing cannot disguise the soap-opera nature of his story. Melodrama and coincidence figure largely, removing the interest from the actions of its intriguing characters.
    • 4/5
      What　I cannot agree with this novel is most of the important actions in this novel are detemined by the unconfirmed presumptions (by Eustacia, Clym and Mrs Yeobright). No characters in the book or the unconfirmed presumptions (by Eustacia, Clym and Mrs Yeobright). No characters in the book or thE narrator try to rectify this error. This is unacceptable and deprives the basic sympathy narrator try to rectify this error. This is unacceptable and deprives the basic sympathy toward this book from me. On the other hand, I am charmed by the good prose and the right words. In this head, HardThemots just.y is much better than Austin or Forster. I should like to admit that I am rather sympathetic with Wildeve. Although he was not loyal to Eustacia through and through, his indecision was understandable and eventually, he proved to be faithful at heart to Eustacia. That is a comparative feat, and as much as possible for an average man.
    • 4/5
      I read this first in the early 1970s as a set book at school. We had a little joke, inspired by the then UK Prime Minister Edward Heath; we expressed the view, privately amongst ourselves, that 'Egdon Heath' was a character, perhapos the key character in the novel. But we never dared breathe a word of this to our teacher, becausae we were sure we were just being daft.imagine my surprise, years later, in finding that many critics agree with us! Egdon Heath, the setting of this novel, is considered to be a major character, with a brooding poresence throuighout the novel and affecting the actions andf disposition of the muchmore minor, merely human characters.
    • 4/5
      The Return of the Native is one of those books you're forced to read in high school. And as such, you're prone to hate it, because high school English teachers make you dissect the creature of literature before you actually get a chance to observe it in action, and you are forced to make observations on the structure of the cold, dead literature, instead of actually observing the living literature in its natural environment.If this is you, please give it a second chance.The story itself is all in the title: someone comes (back) to town. This town, Egdon Heath (one of the few towns in non-genre literature to be widely considered a character in its own right), and its inhabitants receive Clement "Clym" Yeobright back from Paris.It was Thomas Wolfe to whom we attribute the quote "You can never go home again." This is not to mean "We'll lock up behind you, and post sentries," but rather, as time flows, nothing is truly immutable. When you do come back home, it won't be the same. Some furniture will be moved, everybody will be older, and things will be different.But things that are different aren't always bad. You could meet that nice raven-haired lady everyone thinks is a witch, and end up marrying her. You, thinking about settling down, her, thinking about escaping the malevolent town in which she lives.Such is life, especially life in Edgon Heath.This book is recommended for those who have read and enjoyed other works by Hardy, or who enjoy other literary achievements of the time. Also recommended for rereading anybody who was forced to read it in high school.
    • 5/5
      Egdon Heath is a sparsely settled wilderness in the southwest of England. It’s dominated by the wind, the sky and the feral vegetation of fern and furze. It is, as the author introduces it in the first chapter, “a face on which time has made but little impression.” To its native inhabitants it’s a quiet county refuge from the bustle and commotion of the mid-nineteenth century, but to young Eustacia Vye it’s a wilderness of exile from civilized life from which she has little hope of escape. Damon Wildeve, her former boyfriend and owner of the local inn is about to marry Tamsin Yeobright, a pleasing and innocent girl from a good family, and Eustacia is suffering bitter pangs of envy and jealousy. Damon wasn’t all that much of a catch, but emotional entanglement with him was her only source of relief from the tedium of county life. And then she hears that Tamsin’s cousin is coming for a visit. He’s a clever and promising young man, a diamond trader who lives in Paris – Paris the heart of civilization, culture and beauty. But how will she manage a visit to the home of her rival? Eustacia begins to scheme. The characters carry their passions, pride and false assumptions about the motives of their fellows with them as they criss-cross the heath, but ultimately human plans are overwhelmed by the geographies of heath, history, and social convention. But in this reading is of the final, 1912, edition of the novel, only one is able to fulfill his desire. Architect turned novelist Hardy constructs from a realistic masterpiece of beautiful and brooding tragedy. And for the listener, the combination of Hardy’s prose and Rickman’s voice is a rich and sensual delight.
    • 5/5
      I think this is the best of Hardy's novels. Dark, complicated, with characters who make difficult and not often happy decisions. Eustacia Vye is especially well drawn. Worth reading more than once.
    • 4/5
      This novel has all the hallmarks of a classic Hardy novel: doomed love affairs, characters who make poor choices, a portentous environment. Added together, though, it falls a bit short of Hardy's best novels. I think the main problem is that all the characters are either uninteresting or ambiguous at best. Eustacia is probably the most interesting character as the love interest to the "Native" of the title, but she is still one-sided; all she wants is to get out of the heath and live a glamorous life in Paris. Of course, such aspirations are doomed from the outset in Hardy, and her dashed dream is the cornerstone that brings down all the others. Despite its weaknesses, its typical Hardian (Hardy-esque?) strengths make it a worthwhile read.
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite Hardy novel and I love all of Hardy's novels passionately. He's one of my favorite writers, forever. This man understood and dared to write about the lives of women in a time when women didn't count--and he did so without sentimentalizing them. I adore Eustacia, and if she had but lived a hundred years later, all her problems would not be problems.
    • 4/5
      Hardy weaves a tale of passion and tragedy on Egdon Heath in his fictional Wessex. Eustacia Vye's desire to lead a life elsewhere is dashed when she marries Clym Yeobright (the Native) upon his return from Paris. The lives of this couple and their friends and families are depicted in detail in Hardy's penetrating portrayal of the community on the heath. The final section provides some hope for the future, tempering the otherwise bleak landscape of the novel.
    • 1/5
      Oh how I hate this book. I had to study it for English A-level and reading it was torturous. It took me so long, as I kept falling asleep I was so bored.Chapter 1 describes a moor. Chapter 2 describes a man walking across the moor. Chapter 3 describes the man meeting someone on the moor... and so on.The moor is the main character in the book (we concluded at A-level), and while I can spend hours watching the changes on the moors opposite my house I don't really want to spend hours reading about one. I really like Hardy's other novels but I'll only be reading this again if I'm suffering from a prolonged bout of insomnia.
    • 4/5
      There's nothing like a heavy dose of dark Hardy to wring a deep sigh from the cheeriest breast.