Audiobook · read by volunteers
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Read by Marlo Dianne, Chip, Betsie Bush, Graham Williams, David Barnes, Katy Preston, Gesine · 49 chapters · 17 h 35
About the book
Egdon Heath is a vast, brooding stretch of wild country, and in it two people want opposite things. Eustacia Vye is proud and restless and dreams of a more glamorous world than her moor can offer. Clym Yeobright has come home from Paris full of plans for a simple, useful life among the people he grew up with. When they meet, the heath itself seems to take notice. Thomas Hardy's novel is a story of passion, ambition, family quarrels and fatal misunderstandings, where chance has a way of arriving at exactly the wrong moment. It asks whether we shape our own lives or merely live them out, and it does so against a landscape that is almost a character in its own right. Seven LibriVox readers share this long, immersive listen of nearly eighteen hours, spread across forty-nine chapters. A great novel of fate and landscape.
Introduction
Thomas Hardy, born in 1840 and died in 1928, was an English novelist and poet who set most of his work in Wessex, a fictional version of the south-western English countryside where he grew up. He published The Return of the Native in 1878, and it is one of the books that established his reputation. Like his later novels, it treats love, fate and social expectation with a seriousness that some Victorian readers found uncomfortable, and it makes room for doubt about religion, marriage and the supposed benefits of progress.
What stays with most listeners is the place. Egdon Heath is described in the opening pages as an ancient and indifferent presence, older than the people who cross it, and the story keeps returning to its moods: its storms, its bonfires, its silence. The characters are drawn with equal care. Their desires collide, their good intentions fail, and small accidents of timing decide large matters. Hardy has often been called a pessimist, but there is a great deal of warmth in his attention to rustic characters, and a good deal of dry humour too.
This recording runs for about seventeen and a half hours, in forty-nine chapters that include the preface and the novel's six books. Seven LibriVox volunteers share the reading. It is a substantial companion for a long journey or a winter season, and a fine way to meet an author whose landscapes and tragedies have shaped English fiction for well over a century. Anyone who enjoys a long, slow novel in which landscape, weather and character are woven together will find a great deal here to love, and plenty to argue about afterwards.
Public domain
Thomas Hardy died in 1928: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text