The Return of the Native cover art

The Return of the Native

 Preview
Free with 30-day trial
A 30-day trial plus your first audiobook free.
1 credit/month after trial—to buy any title you like, yours to keep.
Listen all you want to a selection of thousands of Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts.
$16.45 a month after 30 day trial. Cancel anytime.

The Return of the Native

By: Thomas Hardy
Narrated by: Alan Rickman
Free with 30-day trial

$16.45/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $27.99

Buy Now for $27.99

About this listen

Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)

Exclusively from Audible

Set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex, Eustacia Vye longs for the excitement of city life but is cut off from the world in her grandfather's lonely cottage. Clym Yeobright who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster seems to offer everything she dreams of: passion, excitement and the opportunity to escape. However, Clym's ambitions are quite different from hers, and marriage only increases Eustacia's destructive restlessness, drawing others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

Considered a truly modern story due to its sexual politics and hindered desires it still holds relevance to audiences today. There is a tension between the symbolic setting of the heath and the modernity of the characters that makes the listener question our freedom to shape our lives as we wish. Are we always able to live our dreams?

Like George Eliot, Hardy was a Victorian realist whose novels and poetry were greatly influenced by Romanticism, especially the poet William Wordsworth. His critical thoughts on Victorian society can be seen throughout much of his work.

Narrator Biography

Multi-award winning actor and director Alan Rickman, famous for roles such as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films and the Sherriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), had a varied career that included performing on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company in modern and classical theatre productions. In America, he gained recognition for his Broadway appearance in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985) and later his role in Die Hard (1988) made him internationally famous. Other notable performances included his 2001 return to the West End and Broadway in Noël Coward's Private Lives and Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman in 2010. Rickman is most remembered for his roles in films such as Love Actually (2003) and Sweeney Todd (2007) as well as voicing Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), and Absalom the Caterpillar in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010).

Public Domain (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Theatre Celebrity Dream

Critic Reviews

"Rickman's voice is masculine and seductive; yet by altering tempo, modulating tone, he becomes Hardy's women and children, utterly compelling as he projects all ranges of emotion. His individualizing dialogue of the human-sized characters, that country chorus who form the backdrop of normality for Hardy's titanic lovers, is brilliant." ( AudioFile)
All stars
Most relevant  
I loved listening to this story alongside reading the book. Alan's performance is beautiful and talented in the way he portrays the different characters.

A wonderful way to appreciate a classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
this story is the perfect vehicle for the orchestral tones of Alan Rickman!! his voices, characterisation and sense of place make this classic tale sing.. and sometimes he literally does sing. excellent and masterful

superbly narrated

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved this story.
Needed to re listen in a few spots due to older language but that didn't detract from enjoying listening. A wonderful performance by Alan Rickman.

A classic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love Thomas Hardy and I love Alan Rickman (may they both rest in peace) so I couldn't go past this one. Alan Rickman's low almost sarcastic voice seems well suited to this rather depressing and ironic story of mismatched lovers on Egdon Heath.

It's typical Hardy in that there's lots of long, slow descriptions of landscape and a fetishistic adoration of the rural and working classes, and such ridiculously bad timings reminiscent of Shakespeare's tragedies. I love all that crazy stuff and the ridiculously complicated language he uses to describe the simplest of things!!! A refreshing intellectual change from modern literature (which I enjoy also, but it's good to go back and read these amazing classics from time to time).

Typical Hardy

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Nowhere near as good Far from the Madding Crowd but beautifully written, nonetheless. Sometimes it was overly and frustratingly contrived.

Good but dragged on a bit to the inevitable

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Loved the language. Loved the characters. Loved the social themes. Loved everything about it. Excellent.

Perfect

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
No author can better express the frustration’s of human existence and the thwarting of passions by the conventions of society and the randomness of fate than Thomas Hardy and there is no better narrator for this, his most tragic of tales, than Alan Rickman. As others have noted, the novel starts slowly. Hardy spends a great deal of time setting up the scene with poetic descriptions of the unforgiving heath of his fictional Wessex and the folklore of the district. The narrative takes a while to kick in, but when it does so, strap yourself in. This is an intense and passionate tale, similar to Wuthering Heights in its depiction of human beings whose fortunes are swept along by a combination of happenstance and almost supernatural forces against a windswept and unforgiving landscape. Rickman brings each character to life masterfully - his rendering of some of the dialogue making one forget for a moment that this is fiction. I have read nearly all of Hardy and this to me is his finest novel, but made even better, if that were possible, by the one of the finest actors of our time - rest his soul.

A Masterpiece

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Alan Rickman breathes greening life into Hardy’s quiet turn of the century romantic novel. Really enjoyed revisiting this story.

Hardy at his less bodice ripping and more character driven best.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I like Thomas Hardy, but I bought this because of Alan Rickman. It was difficult to get into but I persisted for Alan Rickman. Hardy uses almost the whole first chapter describing scenery and climate. When human characters finally began to emerge out of the mist it took ages to work out who they were, and what their relationship was to each other. I had to listen to several of the early chapters two or three times before I sorted them out, and what was going on in their lives to make them behave the way they did. In fact some of the characters just weren't all that well-developed, but the events in their lives were very believable. It ended up being more about events, really, rather than characters. Someone thinks this, which isn't true, so does that, which has horrible consequences. I can totally believe stuff like that. Hardy was a great observer. And all those repeat listens were easy - because Alan Rickman. So sad he's not with us any more.

What's not to love?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
He is just wonderful. Plays the characters as he reads (even their accents he does perfectly!) and sings all the songs out (including flawless French!) - plus if you just tune the speed to 0.75x and you get Professor Snape :3
I miss him so much. Hope he is all well in heaven and can still see how much he is appreciated on earth and in heaven!!
Love forever and ALWAYS. * wand up (LUMOS) * <3

Alan Rickman's Character Performance and Singing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.