Tess of the d'Urbervilles

By Thomas Hardy and Michael Irwin

Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic.

It tells of Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be descended from the ancient family of d'Urbeville. In her search for respectability her fortunes fluctuate wildly, and the story assumes the proportions of a Greek tragedy. It explores Tess's relationships with two very different men, her struggle against the social mores of the rural Victorian world which she inhabits and the hypocrisy of the age.

In addressing the double standards of the time, Hardy’s masterly evocation of a world which we have lost, provides one of the most compelling stories in the canon of English literature, whose appeal today defies the judgement of Hardy’s contemporary critics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848704381

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and author who grew up in the British countryside, a setting that was prominent in much of his work as the fictional region named Wessex. Abandoning hopes of an academic future, he began to compose poetry as a young man. After failed attempts of publication, he successfully turned to prose. His major works include Far from the Madding Crowd(1874), Tess of the D’Urbervilles(1891) and Jude the Obscure( 1895), after which he returned to exclusively writing poetry.

Book preview

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

A Pure Woman

Thomas Hardy

with an introduction and notes

by Michael Irwin

Poor wounded name! my bosom, as a bed,

Shall lodge thee, till thy wound be throughly heal’d. [1]

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

This edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles first published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2000

Introduction and Notes © Michel Irwin 2000

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 438 1

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Contents

General Introduction

Introduction

Selected Bibliography

Author’s Explanatory Note to the First Edition

Author’s Prefaces to the Fifth and Later Editions

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Phase the First: The Maiden

Chapters 1–11

Phase the Second: Maiden No More

Chapters 12–15

Phase the Third: The Rally

Chapters 16–24

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

Chapters 25–34

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays

Chapters 35–44

Phase the Sixth: The Convert

Chapters 45–52

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment

Chapters 53–59

Notes

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

There’s a sense in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles, to invoke a cliché, ‘needs no introduction’. Here is a novel wonderfully easy to enjoy: it is rare for a great work of literature to charge so small an entry fee. Readers who know nothing of Hardy or the history of fiction can be drawn into it in two pages, to find themselves absorbed and moved. But there is far more to this work than meets the casual eye: the further it is explored the more it offers. First published in 1891, Tess is situated on certain crucial boundary lines. In terms of literary history it looks both forward and back. Although often, and understandably, read as a realist novel in the best Victorian tradition, it also anticipates many of the fictional experiments of the century ahead. Hardy has as much in common with Joyce and Lawrence as with Dickens and George Eliot. The traditional elements of the story can well deflect attention from this modernity. In the context of Hardy’s own career, Tess was again near a turning point. As a young man Hardy had hoped to become a poet. He turned to fiction only when his verses had repeatedly been rejected by publishers. By the time he wrote Tess he was past fifty, and well established in his storytelling craft: this was his twelfth novel. But he was to publish only two more, Jude the Obscure and The Well-Beloved, before abandoning fiction altogether and devoting himself wholeheartedly to verse. This second career was to flourish: he had produced a thousand poems and earned a new reputation by the time of his death in 1928. There is a sense in which Tess is a hybrid: everywhere the poet is speaking through the fiction. To enjoy the work merely as a novel is therefore to under-read it, even to misread it.

1

It may be helpful, however, to approach these more complex conclusions by way of simplicities. Tess is a work of wonderful narrative energy. It first appeared in the magazine The Graphic, in illustrated weekly instalments, appealing to a popular readership. Behind it lay Hardy’s many years of experience in that mode of publication. The serial form imposes awkward conditions on the writer. A story capable of holding the interest of a large audience over a period of months must be lively, purposeful and relatively uncomplicated. It must begin briskly to command attention. Exciting or entertaining episodes must be evenly distributed, so that no one instalment will fall flat. Ideally each ‘number’ should end on a note of suspense, pointing the reader forward. Hardy was accustomed to these demands and knew how to meet them. It came naturally to him to deal in striking, self-contained, powerfully-visualised episodes no more than a chapter in length. Probably most readers of Hardy recall his work in terms of such scenes. To think of Tess is to remember, for example, the death of Prince, the dance at Trantridge, the baptism of Sorrow, the harp-playing, the fording of the flooded road, the threshing at Flintcomb Ash, dawn at Stonehenge

Hardy was always a brilliant starter of a novel. None of his great contemporaries was so consistently quick off the mark. But such momentum is not easy to sustain. Of all Victorian novels perhaps The Mayor of Casterbridge and Great Expectations start most explosively, but each has then to ease to a slower pace while further foundations are laid for the narrative to follow. The crisp opening of Tess, by contrast, is brilliantly contrived to initiate a sequence. Parson Tringham tells Durbeyfield, a seedy village carrier, that he is descended from knightly stock. The delighted aristocrat celebrates his newly discovered status late into the night at the local alehouse, from which his daughter, Tess, is obliged to retrieve him. Since the drinking has left him incapable, Tess herself is obliged to drive the waggon for him next day. Having had less than three hours’ sleep she dozes off, with the result that the family’s horse, their means of livelihood, is killed in a collision. Because Tess feels responsible for the accident, deeming herself almost ‘a murderess’, she reluctantly accedes to her mother’s plan that she should go to ‘claim kin’ with the rich d’Urberville family, now assumed to be relatives. Her visit eventually leads to seduction by Alec and pregnancy. The swift succession of events takes the reader through to the end of the second ‘Phase’ of the story, which is directly followed by the pendulum swing from Alec to Angel, from the realm of the flesh to the realm of the spirit. Not only has the narrative progressed at exhilarating pace, through a series of logical steps, but Hardy has been able to set up the thematic contrast that lies at the heart of his conception, and to illustrate his belief that important and even tragic events can derive from the most trivial of causes.

It was a wonderful thing that Hardy, like Dickens before him, could so readily adapt his creative genius to the requirements of a popular medium and even, perhaps, profit from them. But there could be a price to pay for this compromise, and in the case of Tess it was a heavy one. The magazines in which such serialisations appeared were aimed at a family audience, assumed to be highly susceptible to moral shock. A number of times in his career Hardy had been asked to omit or to modify this or that detail lest his readers should be upset. The problems posed by Tess proved far more serious. Three publishers rejected the manuscript as containing elements which might cause offence. Only after pruning and radically revising the text could Hardy get it serialised in The Graphic. The most notable change deformed the whole project. In this version Tess is not seduced by Alec, but is instead tricked into a bogus marriage. Chapters 10 and 11 and the baptism scene, all omitted from the serialisation, were published separately, as isolated sketches, in other magazines. Only in the hard-cover edition of 1891 was Hardy able to set about reassembling his story as originally conceived.

In a sense the fears of those who rejected the manuscript were shown to be justified. Certainly Tess won generous praise, but it was also attacked in some quarters, Hardy being called (in the Quarterly Review) ‘a novelist who, in his own interests, has gratuitously chosen to tell a coarse and disagreeable story in a coarse and disagreeable manner’. His decision to sub-title the work ‘A Pure Woman’ had been a calculated venture into an ethical minefield. The literature and even the painting of the Victorian period had often reflected upon the plight, the relative guilt and the likely fate of ‘the fallen woman’. While many would have been prepared to contemplate the possibility of forgiveness in such circumstances, exculpation was a different matter. Hard-line moralists proved only too willing to reject the proposed defence of Tess’s conduct. ‘We cannot for a moment admit,’ proclaimed R. H. Hutton, in The Spectator, ‘that . . . Tess acted as a pure woman should have acted under such a stress of temptation’.

A hundred years on, such comments seem smugly naïve; but the sub-title probably continues to do Hardy a disservice, in that it tends to confine discussion of the novel to the level of social realism. No serious critic is likely to argue that Tess is, after all, ‘guilty’, but very many choose to concentrate on social and gender issues, to pursue above all such questions as ‘Who is responsible for Tess’s downfall?’ ‘How morally and sexually enlightened does Hardy show himself to be? ‘How fair is he to his unfortunate heroine?’ In a curious back-handed compliment to Hardy’s powers of character-creation, some feminist critics, in particular, have represented Tess as in effect an independent being, variously vulnerable to the harshness, the voyeurism, the prurience or even the sexual assaults of her creator.

Arguably Hardy himself invited the moral protest – and not merely by the challenge implied in his sub-title. He repeatedly relates Tess’s predicament to the known Victorian world and its harsh judgement of what was deemed sexual impropriety in women. Innocent in the eyes of nature, Tess ‘had been made to break an accepted social law . . . ’ (p. 76). Angel is willing to accept the sexual double standard because, despite his attempts to achieve ‘independence of judgement’ he is nevertheless ‘the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings’ (p. 232). The social points are there to be made, and Hardy specifically chooses to make them.

Yet despite this challenging editorial slant the narrative rarely shows the ‘fallen’ Tess suffering in a purely social sense. The ‘society’ in which she moves is not censorious. Her family accept her again without demur, and her fellow workers in her native village in general treat her with kindliness and even tact. Poverty itself need not not have been an issue in that both Alec and Clare at various times promise her all the financial help she is likely to need. It is Tess herself who chooses to reject these offers in whole or in part. The pains she endures derive partly from Alec’s lust and from the moral rigidities of Angel Clare, but partly also from her own beliefs and despairs – very little from condemnation by ‘society’.

To discuss Tess in terms of moral responsibility , whether social or individual, is tacitly to identify it as a realist novel with a marked psychological interest. Certainly the first reviewers typically chose to summarise the plot and talk about the characterisation as though this was the natural way into the work. Yet the fact is that such an approach yields only moderate returns. Three characters dominate the narrative. Of these Alec d’Urberville is by common critical consent the merest stereotype. In what Hardy was later (in his Preface to Jude) to call the ‘deadly war waged between flesh and spirit’ Alec is very obviously the representative of the flesh. But few readers can have found him convincing or effective in this capacity. Lacking even the superficial dash of Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd Alec comes across neither as physically striking, and therefore conceivably attractive to Tess, nor as innately sensual, and therefore, perhaps, a relentless seducer. Notoriously the physical features and the accoutrements which Hardy chooses to stress – the full lips, the curled moustache, the ‘bold rolling eye’, the cigar and the fast gig – are those of the contemporary ‘masher’ or lady-killer, ‘the handsome horsey young buck’ (p. 43). His idiom is similarly stagy: ‘ Upon my honour! cried he, there was never before such a beautiful thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess. ’ (p. 51)

The inference must be that this is a deliberate exercise in stereotyping. Hardy created a ‘villain’ of sketchy psychological interest, because the main emphasis of the story was to fall elsewhere. Like Arabella in Jude the Obscure, Alec is no more than a diagrammatic representation of the temptations of the flesh.

Angel Clare, as his very name implies, is similarly to be seen as a representative figure – but a representative of aesthetic or quasi-religious responses:

. . . he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot – less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal . . . (p. 169)

If Alec has at any rate a parodic element of physical presence, Angel has none. How many readers remember that he has a shapely moustache and straw-coloured beard (p. 99)? His mode of speech, pompous and unidiomatic, is if anything less credible and less appealing even than Alec’s. When he first becomes aware of Tess’s existence he exclaims to himself: ‘ What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is! ’ (p. 106). His notion of affectionate banter is to say to her: ‘ My Tess has, no doubt, almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time ’ (p. 155). In her dealings with these two-dimensional lovers Hardy’s heroine can have only restricted scope for displays of personality. It follows that at the level of characterisation as conventionally defined Tess must be considered a work of limited interest.

The greatness of the novel must be sought elsewhere. It is simple enough to poke fun at moustachioed Alec and wincing Angel, but to do so can be to miss the point. Hardy’s concern here is not with personality but with ideas. He is less interested in showing what sort of individual Clare is than in trying to define the nature of the love he feels for Tess. Angel’s implausible pronouncements quoted above are there to make the thematic point that he sees her in generalised and idealised terms. His new experience of outdoor living has made him familiar with ‘the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and voices of inanimate things’ (p. 105). These are forces which Hardy repeatedly brings to vivid life in his descriptive passages. For Clare, isolated from his family by reluctant loss of religious faith, they have done much to assuage ‘the ache of modernism’ (p. 110). He immediately feels that Tess, this ‘daughter of nature’, epitomises the beauty and innocence of his adopted way of life. That reaction is central to his love for her.

Certainly he fails Tess when she confesses her past to him, and certainly that failure illustrates a radical inconsistency and hypocrisy in Victorian moral attitudes. But the less obvious point is the more interesting one, and is more deeply rooted in the text at large. Repeatedly Hardy shows that Angel’s feelings for Tess are determined by the context in which he comes to know her. For example, he regularly sees her at dawn, when they go milking:

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them.

‘Call me Tess,’ she would say askance; and he did. (p. 115)

The issue concerned is central to the novel. When Tess is pregnant she tends to read into the landscape comments on her personal misfortunes:

At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. (p. 75)

In other words things are what we perceive, or believe, them to be. For Angel Clare, Tess becomes a goddess or ‘a visionary essence of woman’. Consequently his rejection of her on their wedding night is more complex and more interesting than a demonstration of sexual double standards – even though it includes such a demonstration. When Clare says: ‘You were one person; now you are another’ and ‘ . . . the woman I have been loving is not you’ (p. 200) he means what he says. Tess herself has no difficulty in understanding him. The second phrase recalls her own ‘apprehensive foreboding’. Soon after the wedding she had thought to herself: ‘ . . . she you love is not my real self, but one in my image’ (p. 189). Tess’s feelings for Clare, after all, are rather similar in kind: ‘he was . . . godlike in her eyes’ (p. 159).

Indeed throughout the novel Hardy has been at pains to show that human beings in general are prone to idealise, to think and feel beyond the limits of physical fact. The drinkers at Rolliver’s, for example, reach a pleasing state of elevation:

. . . their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon’s temple. (p. 20)

Some of the visitors to Trantridge who have ‘partaken too freely’ enjoy a similar sense of exaltation, described by Hardy again with affectionate irony, but also with delicacy and beauty:

They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously inter-penetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they. (p. 57)

When dancing in the dimly lit outhouse these revellers looked like satyrs, nymphs, Pans, Syrinxes, but when they came out for air Tess saw them differently: ‘the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours’ (p. 55). Though Tess herself seems a goddess to Angel at dawn, she soon undergoes a similar meta-morphosis: ‘Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being who craved it’ (p. 115).

Hardy shows, in such descriptions, his understanding of the human tendency to idealise, to exalt a person or object through association of various kinds. More than that, he himself knowingly, even ostentatiously, partakes of this tendency in the very grain of his descriptions. He can write about a fieldwoman becoming ‘part and parcel of outdoor nature’: ‘she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it’ (p. 77). Or again: ‘Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape . . . ’ (p. 246). The implied message is that if Clare has misunderstood Tess it is largely through a mode of romanticism to which we are all prone. Man cannot have, and would not want, an objective eye. Our instinctive response to the beauties of nature inescapably shapes and colours our sexual feelings. Hardy’s comments on Victorian morality in Tess of the d’Urbervilles naturally lose a good deal of their force a hundred years later, when the moral landscape is so greatly altered. What he says in a larger diagnostic sense about our self-bewildering enhancements of sexual love retains all its original freshness and relevance.

2

The interplay between realism and modernism also characterises the copious passages of description in the novel. It comes naturally to Hardy to be circumstantial. His time-scheme is carefully worked out in terms of months, years and seasons. Locations and distances are defined: when Tess travels, as she so often does, we know how far she has to go. In this literal vein Hardy offers the social historian rich material. For example, there are numerous descriptions of physical labour – reaping, threshing, milking, swede-hacking – and numerous descriptions of clothes:

The women . . . wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. (p. 77)

. . . a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a grey serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and buff-leather gloves. (p. 246)

Hardy himself, in his General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912, drew attention to his own concern to get such details right:

. . . if these country customs and vocations, obsolete and obsolescent, had been detailed wrongly, nobody would have discovered such errors to the end of Time. Yet I have instituted inquiries to correct tricks of memory, and striven against temptations to exaggerate, in order to preserve for my own satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing life.

In doing so, however, he deploys the documentary detail in such a way as to derive from it a variety of ‘modernist’ effects of patterning, association and metaphor. The gloves mentioned in the last two quotations from the text come to recall the gauntlets worn by Tess’s ‘mailed ancestors’ – particularly when she uses one to strike Alec across the face (p. 290). On a previous occasion he has tried to take her hand, but ‘the buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not express the life or shape of those within’ (p. 278). She withdraws her hand, leaving him grasping the glove. The detail provides a compact metaphor for the seduction which gave him access to her body, but not to her mind or spirit. When Tess first sees Angel Clare at Talbothays she notices that ‘Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white shirt’ (p. 99). His very clothes suggest a divided personality, the Victorian gentleman imperfectly disguised as a farmer. Later Tess herself is to be similarly characterised when she is shown wearing ‘a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one’ (p. 305). Alec has tracked her down in Marlott, and she is indeed in the unhappy interlude between her marriage and her premature death.

The work-scenes in the novel are made comparably suggestive. As harvesting proceeds:

Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters. (p. 77)

Like these animals, like the pheasants whom she puts out of their misery (p. 244), Tess is to be hunted down, attacked, destroyed. The threshing scene (Chapter 47) also functions partly as a metaphor. The incessant, sickening, exhausting work exacted by the machine becomes a means of expressing the endless harassment to which Tess has been subject. Appropriately, when there is a break in the labour Alec is immediately on hand to renew his advances.

Two aspects of Hardy’s handling of metaphor are particularly noteworthy. One is that his realist backgrounds are so rich in colour, weather, labour, plants, animals, utensils, ‘stuff’ of all kinds, that potentially metaphorical material is always to hand. Although he will occasionally impose a symbolic analogy on his narrative – as when he uses Stonehenge to underline the point that Tess is a sacrificial victim – his mode of associative suggestion is usually effortless and unobtrusive.

The second point is a more fundamental one. For most Modernist writers – including D. H. Lawrence, who learned a great deal from Hardy – the metaphorical material, for all its potential vividness, is a subordinate aspect of fiction, serving to illuminate a situation or characterisation unambiguously in the foreground. With Hardy the case can be very different. The doomed snakes, rats and pheasants, the dying Prince, pierced through the breast, are not merely invoked to dramatise Tess’s fate. These creatures are victims in their own right: her plight and theirs together illustrate the cruelty of existence. Hardy is suggesting not merely that the misfortunes of animals and humans are analogous but that they are essentially the same.

His copious similes convey a comparable implication. Natural phenomena are depicted as partaking of one another. Cows have teats ‘as hard as carrots’ (p. 107); Tess sees ‘a monstrous pumpkin-like moon’ (p. 156); when she is working on the family allotment ‘Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil’ (p. 305). In each of these cases there are, additional to the immediate comparison, subordinate similarities – concerning, for example, fecundity, ripeness, fullness, fragility. Given the general metaphorical context thus created, it seems unsurprising that Hardy should bring his heroine into comparison with a bird, a cat, a snake, a flower, a berry, a mushroom. Human beings are shown implicitly to be part of the natural environment and subject to its laws. So it comes about that on a fine spring day ‘the stir of germination . . . moved her, as it moved the wild animals’ (p. 88). The formulation is a tautology rather than a simile, as is a related statement on the same page: ‘some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs’. Later Hardy refers to ‘The appetite for joy which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed . . . ’ (p. 167). The tragedy of Tess and Angel is not merely an accidental drama of individualities: ‘All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale’ (p. 114). Hardy the realist tell his story, but Hardy the modernist and poet is offering an account of underlying patterns and forces, a diagnosis of the very workings of the world: ‘So do flux and reflux – the rhythm of change – alternate and persist in everything under the sky’ (p. 308).

3

This singularity of vision demands an unusual kind of reader response. In most novels the memorable episodes are likely to be those generating interaction between two or more characters. Hardy’s great scenes often depict a single individual involved in a landscape. His best critics, perceiving this emphasis instinctively, have tended to focus on such incidents. Tess of the d’Urbervilles features probably the most discussed passage of this type in the whole of Hardy’s fiction: the scene in which Tess listens to Angel playing the harp:

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells – weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound. (p. 108–9)

To appreciate the richness and complexity of such an episode it is necessary to be at home with Hardy’s unique blend of dense realism and abstract suggestion. Two or three factors immediately stand out. The succulent sensuality is synaesthetic in its effect. All our senses are alerted and perplexed as the sound of the harp fuses with the colours and the scents and the damp stickiness of the garden. But at first glance it is hard to decide whether the agreeable or the disagreeable elements predominate – whether the bright colours and breeze-like harmonies are more prominent than the slug-slime and the ‘offensive smells’.

In a sharply patterned novel this scene is specifically a counterpart to the two-chapter sequence – omitted from the serial version – which concludes with the seduction in The Chase. There Tess yielded to Alec. Here, in an entirely different sense, she yields to Angel Clare. The summer-evening ‘atmosphere’, the music, the references to mist, to pollen, to slime, to tears are some of the links between the two passages. Curiously the final scene in The Chase is stylistically subdued, distanced, even decorous, while the paragraphs quoted here are so steeped in erotic innuendo as virtually to constitute a metaphor for the sexual act. The irony is calculated. In the earlier, peaceful scene Alec arrives to impose his sexual will on the sleeping Tess. In the garden episode there are the frankest possible hints of sexual arousal – but the author is at pains to assert that this is not the point. ‘Tess was conscious of neither time nor space’: hers is a spiritual experience, essentially to do with love rather than with physical desire. It is characteristic of Hardy that he can impose this emphasis while still making it clear that the two sensations are linked – the sexual response can engender, or help to engender, the spiritual one, very roughly as the ‘juicy grass’ can somehow send up ‘mists of pollen’ which seem to be Angel’s ‘notes made visible’. The point cannot be elucidated without some unpacking of the metaphor, but even preliminary moves of this kind involve an over-simplification. Hardy uses the language of metaphor because it is richer and subtler than literal explanation. It was probably chiefly for that reason that he was eventually to turn from fiction to poetry.

4

For the most part the two methodologies in Tess – the realist and the modernist – sit very comfortably together. Talbothays, for example, is both a defined topographical space, with its own climate, vegetation, work, way of life, and a region of the mind or spirit, the domain of love and happiness. Tess’s journey to it is both a physical journey, measurable in hours and miles, and a transition from a defeated to a hopeful mode of being.

But the extent to which the novel has been read in terms of social and gender issues does suggest that the two approaches can conflict, and that when they do the realist mode is felt to predominate. Tess herself is presented so intimately as a girl of particular temperament and appearance, who weeps, laughs, yawns, sleeps, blushes, bleeds, perspires, that it seems natural to repond to her story as that of an individual, and wonder whether she would indeed have been attracted to Alec, or capable of murdering him. As Hardy the storyteller draws us into his narrative he makes us literal minded. Many a reader will conclude the novel wondering whether Angel Clare will ‘really’ marry Liza-Lu. It is a great thing for a writer to be able to involve us, in this fashion, in the ‘truth’ of an imagined story. Yet here the price paid for such involvement is too high if we are deflected from an appreciation of Hardy’s more complex and comprehensive enterprise – that of showing how curiously and confusingly compounded are our sexual and our aesthetic instincts, our physical and our emotional energies, our romantic love for individuals and our transforming responses to the natural world.

Michael Irwin

Professor of English Literature

University of Kent at Canterbury

Selected Bibliography

John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge University Press, 1978

Penny Boumelha, Thomas and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Harvester, 1982

J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye, Oxford, 1986

Jean Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure, Cornell University, 1971

Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction, Faber, 1974

Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts, Macmillan, 1979

Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1967

J. T. Laird, The Shaping of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Oxford, 1975

J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Harvard, 1970

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, Bodley Head, 1971

Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, Routledge, 1988

Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way, University of Malaya, 1965

Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, Macmillan, 1981

Two useful anthologies of essays on the novel are:

Albert J. LaValley (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Prentice-Hall, 1969

Peter Widdowson (ed.), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Macmillan, 1993

An interesting counterweight to some of the works cited here is Robert Schweik’s ‘Less than Faithfully Presented: Fictions in Modern Commentaries on Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in Charles P. C. Pettit (ed.), Reading Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1998.

Author’s Explanatory Note to the First Edition

The main portion of the following story appeared – with slight modifications – in The Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.

I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.

November 1891

Author’s Prefaces to the Fifth and Later Editions

This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book, and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive spirit in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles has been received by the readers of England and America would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand.

I include amongst them the reviewers – by far the majority – who have so generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative intuition.

Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering.

The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of civilisation. They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation afforded by the finest side of their own Christianity. Others dissent on grounds which are intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, and not those of an earlier and simpler generation – an assertion which I can only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest; as one is reminded by a passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe [2] on judges of this class: ‘They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is. The cause of the dispute, therefore, lies in the very first principles, and it would be utterly impossible to come to an understanding with them.’ And again: ‘As soon as I observe that anyone, when judging of poetical representations, considers anything more important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.’

In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something or other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him to read the book through three times, owing to my not having made that critical effort which ‘alone can prove the salvation of such an one’. In another, he objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s pitchfork, a lodging-house carving-knife and a shame-bought parasol appearing in a respectable story. In another place he was a gentleman who turned Christian for half an hour the better to express his grief that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals should have been used; though the same innate gentility compelled him to excuse the author in words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: ‘He does but give us of his best.’ I can assure this great critic that to exclaim illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an original sin of mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some local originality; though if Shakespeare were an authority on history, which perhaps he is not, I could show that the sin was introduced into Wessex as early as the Heptarchy itself. Says Glo’ster in Lear, otherwise Ina, king of that country:

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.’ [3]

The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget; professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the occasion; modern ‘Hammers of Heretics’; sworn Discouragers, ever on the watch to prevent the tentative half-success from becoming the whole success later on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under the name of practising the great historical method. However, they may have causes to advance, privileges to guard, traditions to keep going; some of which a mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the world strike him, without any ulterior intentions whatever, has overlooked, and may by pure inadvertence have run foul of when in the least aggressive mood. Perhaps some passing perception, the outcome of a dream hour, would, if generally acted on, cause such an assailant considerable inconvenience with respect to position, interests, family, servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife. He therefore valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters, and cries ‘Shame!’ So densely is the world thronged that any shifting of positions, even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe. [5] Such shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a novel.

July 1892

The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this story, when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was still fresh to the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what they are worth, as something once said; but probably they would not have been written now. Even in the short time which has elapsed since the book was first published, some of the critics who provoked the reply have ‘gone down into silence’, as if to remind one of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine.

In the present edition it may be well to state, in response to inquiries from readers interested in landscape, prehistoric antiquities, and especially old English architecture, that the description of these backgrounds in this and its companion novels has been done from the real. Many features of the first two kinds have been given under their existing names: for instance, the Vale of Blackmoor, or Blakemore, Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury Hill, High-Stoy, Bubb-Down Hill, The Devil’s Kitchen, Cross-in-Hand, Long-Ash Lane, Benvill Lane, Giant’s Hill, Crimmercrock Lane, and Stonehenge. The rivers Froom or Frome, and Stour, are, of course, well known as such. And in planning the stories the idea was that large towns and points tending to mark the outline of Wessex – such as Bath, Plymouth, The Start, Portland Bill, Southampton, &c. – should be named outright. The scheme was not greatly elaborated, but, whatever its value, the names remain still.

In respect of places described under fictitious or ancient names – for reasons that seemed good at the time of writing – discerning persons have affirmed in print that they clearly recognise the originals: such as Shaftesbury in ‘Shaston’, Sturminster Newton in ‘Stourcastle’, Dorchester in ‘Casterbridge’, Salisbury in ‘Melchester’, Salisbury Plain in ‘The Great Plain’, Cranborne in ‘Chaseborough’, Cranborne Chase in ‘The Chase’, Beaminster in ‘Emminster’, Bere Regis in ‘Kingsbere’, Woodbury Hill in ‘Greenhill’, Wool Bridge in ‘Wellbridge’, Hartfoot or Harput Lane in ‘Stagfoot Lane’, Hazelbury in ‘Nuzzlebury’, Bridport in ‘Port-Bredy’, Maiden Newton in ‘Chalk Newton’, a farm near Nettlecombe Tout in ‘Flintcomb Ash’, Sherborne in ‘Sherton Abbas’, Milton Abbey in ‘Middleton Abbey’, Cerne Abbas in ‘Abbot’s Cernel’, Evershot in ‘Evershead’, Taunton in ‘Toneborough’, Bournemouth in ‘Sandbourne’, Winchester in ‘Wintoncester’, and so on. I shall not be the one to contradict them; I accept their statements as at least an indication of their real and kindly interest in the scenes.

January 1895

The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were collected as stated in the Preface of 1891, these pages were overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in Chapter 10.

Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character – an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. Melius fuerat non scribere. [5] But there it stands.

The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November 1891.

March 1912

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Phase the First

The Maiden

Chapter 1

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blackmore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a grey mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.

‘Good night t’ee,’ said the man with the basket.

‘Good night, Sir John,’ said the parson.

The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round.

‘Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road about this time, and I said Good night, and you made reply "Good night, Sir John," as now.’

‘I did,’ said the parson.

‘And once before that – near a month ago.’

‘I may have.’

‘Then what might your meaning be in calling me Sir John these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?’ [6]

The parson rode a step or two nearer.

‘It was only my whim,’ he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: ‘It was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?’

‘Never heard it before, sir!’

‘Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and chin – a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls [7] in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the Second’s reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were knighted from father to son, you

Reviews for Tess of the d'Urbervilles

[stewartry · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Spoilers be nigh. I read this in high school (sort of), which may explain why I hated it so passionately. I think the only thing I ever read in school that I didn't hate with a passion was Romeo and Juliet (and I was apparently very lucky about that – I understand school usually does a number on Shakespeare for people, too). I remember reading R&J upside-down in the living room armchair, enraptured by and a little drunk on the language. (The latter might have been partly because I was upside down, of course.) All I remember about Tess is the sick feeling of depression when I finished. (Which, given the circumstances, means that this was a remarkably poor choice of books for me at that moment in my life. Why did I never have a decent English teacher? Where was Robin Williams when I needed him?) I remember that, and had a vague presentiment that Tess would hang at the end of the book, but I was fixed on the idea that she must kill herself – somehow I completely forgot about the murder of Alec D'Urberville. And never have I been more delighted by a bloodstain in my life. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I chose audio format for this buddy read with Kim and Hayes and Simran and Jemidar (thank you, my friends!), and I'm glad I did. Not only do I think the world of Simon Vance (whose voice for Angel Clare almost seduced me into forgetting how worthless he was and made me want to forgive him. Almost), but the dialect in print was very likely one reason I loathed this book lo! those many years ago. Vance's compassionate reading was very likely one big reason I did not loathe this book this time. His feminine voices aren't the cringe-worthy things many male narrators produce – his Tess, light and with just the right amount of accent for whatever circumstance, became Tess for me. The men in this book remind me of Ricky's film about the plastic bag in American Beauty, without the beauty: a gust of wind, and the bag soars up; the air stills and the bag drops. A breath, and it skitters to one side; a draft, and it slides to the right. Every change in the wind sends these men in another direction, with another disposition – ecstatic, righteous, lust-filled, angry, depressed… sometimes several of these in one chapter. Alec D'Urberville seems to go from lusty jackass to proselytizing jackass in the blink of an eye, converting like an impressionable child based more on the demeanor of Parson Clare than on what he said – and then, of course, one look at Tess flips him right back again like a light switch: up = hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, down = creepy, creepy rapist. Angel Clare … Oh, where to begin? His treatment of Tess – and then his change of mind, and then his change back, and then back again, and his offhand devastation of Izz Huett … his flip-flopping makes your average politician look like a model of unswerving determination. The man up and sailed to Brazil on the strength of a travel agency sign. Brazil. It's not like going to Brighton. There is one man in the tale who has a more consistent character: Tess's father. He's a lazy stupid drunk, and that never changes. He seizes on a straw in the wind to – in his and his wife's minds at least – lend countenance to his innate laziness. His concentration never wavers from the skellintons in the ancient tombs and all that is, he thinks, due him as the descendant of same. He's an ass, and worthless as a father, a husband, and a human being, and I hate him deeply. I think I hate him more than the other two, even. The person I don't hate, and this shocks me, is Tess. Poor Tess. She didn't want to be put into the position her parents shoved her into – which resulted in her rape. She certainly didn't want anything to do with Alec D'Urberville, but unfortunately she fell asleep, poor little bint, and unfortunately he was a thorough-going bastard. Throughout the book she does the best she can to prevent situations – but it's an ineffectual best, and she is overruled and overpowered and left bleeding by the worthless men in her life, father, "cousin", beloved. There were several aspects of her situation that I was surprised at, because it was as if Hardy smoothed the road for her a bit. I was surprised when the Durbeyfield neighbors did not shun Tess after the birth of the baby; I fully expected her to be spat on. They were not wholly forgiving (as witness the family's eviction after the father dies), but much better than I expected, to her face at least. I was shocked when the baby died – I fully expected him to be a growing millstone around her neck, much harder to get past than a history including a dead child. I was surprised once more when, Izz and Retty and Marian having all also fallen in love with Angel Clare, they decided that they did not and could not hate Tess for being the chosen one, and – whatever damage they did her accidentally – all remained her friends throughout. Even Clare's parents became more kindly disposed to her (which is made into a point against them, in a satirical way, but would have been a good thing for Tess if she could have taken advantage of it). It seems to me that a great many authors would have chosen to isolate Tess, make it their poor beleaguered lass against the world, saved only by the love of a weak man who then also turns away from her; that Hardy chose a more realistic route is a huge point in his favor. There are times when it's nice to have a faulty memory. I re-read this book as if it were the first time, and I'm glad of it – I had no idea how everything would turn out, and I was freed to hope for the best even while I (with that one partial memory in mind) feared the worst: I did know it was not a happily-ever-after book, but the details were drowned in the past. The language, while slightly purple in places, was beautiful; the story genuinely moved me. I could not be more amazed. (Buddy reads FTW!)

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book is beautifully written, so much so, I took off a star because it is all so sad. Tess, is a woman betrayed, and the full millstones of the gods descend on her. Do read it, and then try a cheer up routine. At first a bowdlerized version was a magazine serial in 1891...but if you had the money, you could buy the whole thing in three hardcover volumes in 1892.

[heart77 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Bad things happening to a pristine waif. She was a true symbol of feminine modesty and virtue. This is why it was especially sad that so many bad things happened. It was a long time ago. Life was bad back then. Men were especially wicked, evil man-demons who existed only to exploit delicate women.

It's a classic, but not a good one.

[hmskip · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great, tragic story.

[helynrob · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

so melodramatic!!!!

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Prachtig, in de eerste plaats als smartelijk liefdesverhaal.Centrale figuur Tess is heel geloofwaardig uitgewerkt; bijna sotto voce.Naturalistisch accent in sociaal stigma, de erfelijke belasting en het noodlotsthema maar niet overdreven.Figuur van Angel is intrigerend, maar niet helemaal geloofwaardig (zijn sociaal nonconformisme vloekt met zijn verstoting van Tess om sociale redenen). Het einde (vooral het huwelijk van Angel met Liza Lie is heel ongeloofwaardig)Prachtige setting in agrarische Engeland in volle verandering (machines)

[xine2009 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Profoundly affecting.

[mthelibrarian_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Spellbinding, suspenseful, and a must-read. Cannot believe I have not read this before, but glad I read all of Jane Austen first. Hardy was absolutely brilliant! It's been awhile since I spent days raging to family about a character or cried on walks while listening to audio (I also read portions from my hard copy which has been on my shelf for years).

[jerhogan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's a pretty uplifting book with the title character being the kind that needs a good shake up! Of course Tess was let down by Angel deserting her although she was raped by Alec, or at least was not desiring a relationship with Alec. I suppose it is a tragedy brought on by the morals of the times

[alcracka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am currently sitting in a gorgeous B&B in the very county where Thomas Hardy was born, a few miles from a hill Tess herself climbed. Sydling, in case you were wondering. Dorset. It's beautiful, and this book is really location-specific - Hardy spends an inordinate amount of time describing the countryside in minute detail, and you look out the window and yep, that's what it's like.

The advice I give to people who aren't feeling Tess, which never helps because if you ain't feelin' it it ain't gettin' felt, is to not take it too seriously. It's a Melodrama (capital M!). Everything in it is totally over the top. I thought it was a blast. Think of it as Hardy gleefully jumping the shark. The pheasant scene is what does it for me - you'll know it when you get there, it won't be long - it's beautiful and vividly drawn, but at the same time ludicrously overblown. That's the novel. Hardy is pulling the stops out.

No spoilers, I promise: The ending is the same deal. Some folks criticize it for being sortof "TA-FRIGGIN'-DAH!" But that's why I love it. Why not? In my opinion, anyone who hates that ending secretly wishes they'd thought of it themselves. Someone had to write that. Hardy did.

[danaenicole-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2014: ...What? (2 stars)2016 [SPOILERS]: I remember the first time I finished this book, in bed in my college dorm room with my mouth hanging open from the moment Tess declared "I have killed him!" A second reading really was necessary to process.I think I care more for Tess than I usually care about characters, somehow. My heart aches for her in all the ways her life goes wrong. And I cheer for her because she really is a strong and mature character. She's very well-written.Alec D'Urberville, on the other hand is sufficiently infuriating, as is Angel Clare. Alec makes me want to scream when he just won't leave Tess alone. I want to smack him. But that didn't do Tess any good... And Angel with his hypocrisy and self-righteousness... Ugh. Poor Tess. I should want Tess to find a better man than Angel, but she loves him so much, I tend to want him to come to his senses instead.In regards to Tess' experience with Alec, the writing of it frustrates me a bit. To me, up through that moment, it is very clear that Alec raped Tess. She never liked him, never showed him any affection. She blatantly wiped away his kiss. He made her very uncomfortable. Her behavior through that point gives me absolutely no reason to believe that Tess would willingly have sex with Alec. Afterward, however, the writing makes it seem more like they had been in a relationship and she had willingly slept with him, though she regretted it later. And those two interpretations just don't jive. After thinking about it, I've decided on my interpretation. I think it is kind of both of the above. I think Alec raped her. And then because of the society she lived in, after that happened, Tess felt like she belonged to Alec or was tied to him in a way. It's even said in the book that she's more married to Alec than she is to Angel. Of course, I don't believe that, but I think that would have been her thought process. So, I think that after Alec "claimed" her, she continued working at the D'Urberville estate, and probably allowed him to have sex with her again, though she still didn't want that kind of relationship with him. Until finally, she couldn't live with it anymore, and she left for home.Through all that, it really is a surprisingly feminist book for one written by a man in the 1800's. I should read more of his work (any suggestions?). I also think this book could inspire a really good modern film adaptation.I think my only complaint aside from maybe the ambiguity of the [rape/seduction is that it can be quite slow, especially during Tess' employment at the dairy. I almost only brought my rating up one star because of that, but I love Tess so much and the story itself is so beautifully tragic that I rated it 4 stars.I want to write a better review of this book. Maybe I'll edit this sometime.

[ukforever · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tess was my first. This depressing and enchanting story of a woman in rural England struggling against 'a sea of troubles' was my introduction to Hardy, now my favorite author of fiction, through the excellent 2008 miniseries.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't remember anything about this book. Evidently, it didn't do much with my imagination.

[ellabelakovska · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Apologies for the length of this review, but it's still considerably shorter than the book and may save you time in the long run!

It all started well enough with a lightly humourous approach to Tess's father's discovery of the ancient bloodline. The plot then moved along fairly quickly to find Tess in a new position in the service of the only other living D'Urbervilles - who turn out not to be actual D'Urbervilles at all, but that's another tangent altogether. The master of the house takes a shine to our Tess and she daily encounters his attentions in pursuit of her, but she's having none of it. Thus, late one night, on her way home from the local village, the rogueish D'Urberville gets her alone and has his wicked way with her.

This is the point at which, I am sure, the reader's interest was intended to have been piqued and hereafter taken on a journey of Tess's turbulent consequential situations and emotions. Sadly, for me, this was the point where it all started to lose my attention. It really isn't clear that Tess has definitely been raped - yes, you can read through the lines and work it out but the next chapter meanders along pointlessly before we finally confirm that Tess has not only had sex (consensually or otherwise) but has had a baby as a result. Only the conversations between Tess and her mother: 'Twas not your fault', 'Aye, but I'm such a terrible person nonetheless' etc. clarify that Tess really did not welcome the physical advances of D'Urberville that night.

***SPOILERS***

As if Tess wasn't getting morbid enough, the baby then dies and is not provided with a Christian burial because it wasn't properly baptised. Tess is understandably grief stricken but somewhat stoic and ends up taking work as a milkmaid. From thereon in, Tess continues in much the same vein, lamenting what a terrible person she is, a sinful woman who no man will ever love, blah blah blah, while keeping her head down at work.

Once again though, she has caught the attention of a young suitor, Angel Clare; only this time she quite likes him back. But remember, dear reader, she is a FALLEN WOMAN and must therefore rebuke all his advances! This is where it goes from slightly dull to downright ridiculous. Angel carries on pursuing her for some time, she keeps knocking him back, her roommates think she's barmy as they're all madly in love with him too, ergo she tries to push him in their general direction, so altruistic and magnanimous is she.

Inevitably, she gives in and admits she fancies him but she won't marry him because she's a HARLOT and IMPURE and he must never know! So then we trawl through another few chapters which pretty much repeat the above ad nauseum. Then she decides she will marry him, but should she tell him about her past or not? (repeat) Her one attempt to tell him is foiled by blasted artistic licence/fate and she goes ahead and marries him anyway. And then tells him. And he handles the whole situation in an unconditionally loving, non-judgmental and accepting way. Except he doesn't. Poor old Tess is fraught for days while she waits for him to decide how he feels about it all and, alas, he tells her he doesn't feel very good about it at all. He adopts a full on 'woe is me' attitude not dissimilar to his new (JEZEBEL) wife's bemoanings and buggers off to Brazil. Not before bumping into one of the other ladies who loved him so, inviting her to come with him, then changing his mind in the space of two pages. Meanwhile, the other ladies haven't fared too well in their grief at losing out on him to Tess: suicide attempts and alcoholism no less! He must be one hell of a catch!!

Anyway, the story then rambles on again, with Tess moving around the fields of Wessex like a ghost, lamenting all the while and wishing her husband would come back to her. Then, completely inexplicably, D'Urberville reappears in her life, begs her forgiveness, and asks her to come and live with him as his wife - because apparently she IS really his wife, what with him being the first to do rude stuff to her and all. Even more inexplicably, she agrees to it! Only, would you believe it? Just at that exact moment, Angel decides he's been a bit of a wally and returns to England to patch things up with poor Tess. Following a short conversation between the estranged spouses, Tess (without any description of thought pattern or motive) only goes and kills D'Urberville! She could have packed her bags and left, of course, but that just wouldn't be melodramatic enough.

Needless to say, it all catches up with her and, following a five night stay in an empty mansion and a night under the stars at Stonehenge of all places, the final page of this sorry tale sees Tess swinging from the gallows while her husband (the one she legally married, not the one she had a child to) walks off hand in hand with her little sister.

THE END

Maybe as a 21st century feminist I cannot possibly sympathise with Tess; her wet, pathetic insistence that she didn't deserve any happiness coupled with her tendency to just go along with what everyone else wanted, to increasingly stupid lengths just grated on me. I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable, or any more than 2D caricatures. Angel degenerated into a pious little upstart and the only positive came towards the end when Tess finally gets a bit indignant and writes him a letter that gives him a jolly good ticking off! Unfortunately, she can only maintain this attitude for all of five minutes until she claps eyes on him again and... well, you know the rest.

I've since heard that Hardy wrote the equivalent of soap opera stories in his day and I only wish I had known this before I picked up 'Tess'. If you're looking for Emo-style, weak characters who take ages to make a single decision over the most minute points, Tess is for you. If you prefer strong characters, fast-paced stories and a satisfying outcome, steer well clear!!

[snukes-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book came highly recommended by everyone I know who has read it. I had some trouble getting started, and while I can appreciate the artistry of the author and his commitment to creating a world that is practically tangible to the reader, I found myself occasionally skimming across sections, looking for the next bit of action. All the way up to the very end, I could not really see what it was about the book that made all my friends - some o them very hard to please - so interested in this story. Life kept throwing worse and worse turns at Tess and Tess herself is occasionally the only one responsible for how things are. I found myself wanting to shake her and tell her to suck up her pride and just *write* to the man already. But the end really did make the rest worthwhile. After finishing the whole story, the more I thought about it, the more I found myself liking it.

[sunnycouger-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I truly believe that this is the greatest book ever written. There is nothing about this book that I can criticise - it has drama, romance, betrayal, violence, tragedy and every part of it lulls you in. What the truly great thing about the book is that all the characters are flawed - Tess, even as a great literary heroine is naive to a fault, almost to the point of stupidity at times. She's selfless to a fault and because of her inexperience she never truly fights for what she wants, and it's a trait that sometimes makes you want to shake her and tell her she's worth more, that she deserves happiness and that she's got to fight for it more, but her naivety is a trait that you find yourself accepting and wanting to protect her from.

She's a victim of circumstance, and whether you buy into her being raped or merely seduced by Alex, the undeniable fact is that she was taken advantage of. Alex is a character who comes in with the air of a stereotypical victim complete with the evocative language designed to show how worldly wise and sleazy he is compared to Tess' ignorance and innocence. He, in a lot of ways though is an honest villain - he does her wrong, attempts to attone before basically backing her into a corner in her weakest moments and looking after her and her family when the hero of the piece has left her abandoned. Make no mistakes though, Alex is never a guy you like, or fully trust and even when he's 'good' there is still the dangerous air about him and the way he plays on her doubts, insecurities and fears shows that even as a changed character, at the end of the day he is still just a predator.

Perhaps the most interesting character is Angel - the love interest and one more man who does her wrong. He meets and falls in love with her and pursues her relentlessly until she agrees to marry him and then, when she eventually agrees he casts her aside with such stunning hypocrisy that you want desperately to hate him for it. He admits that prior to their marriage that he had taken another lover and that confession leads to Tess confessing what happened in her own past and the scene where she's begging his forgiveness is heartbreaking.

Angel, deciding he can't be with Tess due to her 'sins' decides to separate for her until he can forgive her, and Tess, in her shame at hurting him agrees to every term he demands. Angel, after separating from her decides to go to Brazil but in his heartbreak he considers taking a mistress with him and propositions Tess' friend and it is only when she admits that Tess loves him more than she ever could he realises his folly, but it's a sign of the utter hypocrisy of the times.

The return of Angel, and the culmination of the Tess,Angel,Alex dynamic is heartbreaking. You want so badly for Angel and Tess to have their happily ever after, you want Tess to have good things happen for once in her life, but ultimately you know that it's not going to happen. I remember reading this for the first time as a kid and being shocked and heartbroken how it ended despite the clues throughout, and even after multiple re-readings and knowing how it ends, I still read it and get shocked and heartbroken because I will never stop wanting Tess and Angel to get away. There's something about tragedy and soulmates being wrenched asunder under such tragic circumstances after wasting so much time due to stupid things that will never not be relevant be it in 19th Century Wessex, or 21st century anywhere.

If you haven't read it, please do. It's an amazing book with amazing characters and everyone should read it at least once in their lives.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked up Tess to listen to during the last week of September to celebrate Banned Books Week. Originally published in 1888, this book was often censored for sexual content. It is still often included as required reading in many high schools - and is still occasionally censored.

Tess Durbeyfield comes from a poor family that are descendents of the noble D'Urbevilles. In the hopes that Tess can marry a distant cousin, Alec D'Urbeville, Tess' parents send her to work in his household. Instead, young Tess is seduced by Alec and her reputation is ruined. She goes to work as a dairy maid in a distant farm where she is unknown. She falls in love with a handsome gentlman, Angel Clare, throwing Tess in a dilemma of whether or not she should tell Angel of her past.

This book is a wonderful example of the double standard of sexual conduct held during Victorian times between men and women. Although Tess' problems are really caused by men, she pays the ultimate price for their behavior. I found this story haunting - so beautifully written and told, and so sad. Wonderful narration by Simon Vance!

[elaineruss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awww it was simply lovely re-reading this after so long. A fabulous book.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hardy poses a complete rejection of Victorian ideals through the cultivation of utterly futile and tragic characters, his heroine most of all. The story devolves into complete oblivion, and then the bottom drops out. Hardy, unlike Dickens for example, has a verbose prose style that often works against him. Despite this, the sheer power and absurdity of the thematic elements of the story redeem it from wordiness for the most part. A heavy antidote to the sickly romantic victories of Jane Austen, though the characters may be equally unlikable. That is probably Hardy's intent, however. We are to pity Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare, swallowed up by fate rather than embraced by it. Unlike Austen and some others, Hardy sees the sometimes present maelstrom which they reject outright.

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you haven't tested Hardy's stature for a while by actually reading his work, you might have forgotten how gloomy the world he depicts is. The undeniable richness of description and tone ought to be some compensation, perhaps, but the pessimism and fatalism still hangs heavy. And especially with Tess; she's not as spirited or insightful as you would want from a female lead, and is brought down low, oh so low, by, by what? Oh yes, her youthful innocence being taken advantage of by a plausible cad. (He's a baddie, but at least has clear-sighted motives, hers are rarely unwrapped). So she's raped, and thus tainted and lost, and that's pretty much the core of the entire narrative, as it develops, and the seeming moral rationale of her fate. Whilst one ought to be willing to think into the mindset of the day, this unbending and imbalanced sense of propriety seems so outrageous, not to say indeed absurd to this reader, that it's hard to engage too deeply with a story and characters, so emotionally pitched to it. Just as with Hardy's fussing over details of ecclesiatical doctrine, impenetrably trivial from this sight. And although Hardy's motive in writing Tess seems to have been to distance himself from those prevaling dogmas that punished fallen women for their misfortune, that apparent opposition, at this remove, has but a fraction of the impact of the poweful codes so starkly portrayed here.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tess starts out as an emblem of innocence, a pretty country girl who delights in dancing on the village green. Yet the world conspires against her. Her travails begin when her family is in need and decides to seek help from relatives by the name of d’Urberville. They send Tess to ask them for help. Seduced by a duplicitous older man, her virtue is destroyed when she bears his child and her future life is shaped by a continual suffering for crimes that are not her own.Cast out by a morally hypocritical society, Tess identifies most strongly with the natural world and it is here that Hardy's textual lyricism comes into its own. His heroine's physical attributes are described with organic metaphors - her arm, covered in curds from the milking, is 'as cold and damp ... as a new-gathered mushroom'. At the height of Tess's love affair with the parson's son, Angel Clare, Hardy describes a summer of 'oozing fatness and warm ferments'. When she is separated from him, Tess is depicted digging out swedes in a rain-drenched, colourless field, working until 'the leaden light diminishes'. Tess’ baby symbolizes Tess’ bad circumstances and innocence in the sense since this baby was innocent having done nothing wrong, but it was punished by society for coming from such an evil act. Having been raped, Tess was also innocent of the crime, but she was still punished and pushed aside by society. This book deals with the oppression of an innocent girl. Most of the consequences she faced were not consequences of her own actions which makes this story somewhat of a tragedy in that sense giving the book a mood that you can try to make for yourself a good life, but you do not determine your own outcome. Hardy uses a lot of imagery and describes the scenery in great detail. While each individual sentence may not be difficult to understand, it is the way the various sentences fit together to form a whole picture which separates him from other authors. His evocative descriptions are underpinned by a gripping story of love, loss and tragedy. According to Hardy's biographer, Claire Tomalin, the book 'glows with the intensity of his imagination'. It is this that remains the key to its lasting power.

[artikaur · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I could barely make it halfway through this book before I had to toss it aside. I hate it when the author tries to write a sentence phonetically, instead of just typing it out in standard English, and then saying (spoken in a _____ accent). It makes it very difficult to read. That bit aside, the little that I did read seemed to be following a very tragic route. Firstly, her parents are extremely foolish, and very poor, and have a string of children to feed. She accidentally kills the family horse, and then tries to restore honor by going to work for what she thinks is her rich relation (they aren't even related). Her mother hopes she will marry the rich relation. Instead, he rapes her. The child that she has (aptly named Sorrow), dies in infancy. That is about the point where I started to just lose interest. It's a bit depressing to be reading about rape and infant death. The book does have some redeeming qualities. For instance, Hardy was a bit of a rebel for his time- he wrote things that seriously wounded Victorian sensibilities. He wrote of poverty, death, and rape, at a time when that was not considered to be part of "polite" conversation. What today might be considered mild, was certainly at the time the book was written, considered outrageous. This is probably the reason why this book would be included on a school's reading list.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book by Hardy comes to me highly recommended by others and it lived up to its high recommendation. Tess Durbeyfield is a tragic heroine, Angel Clare is maddening. Men readily abuse this young woman who starts out so sweet and ends so tragically. Tess's spirit is slowly destroyed by the events until the final moment of passion. I am thankful that I knew nothing about this book going in to it and therefore I am not going to say anything here. Even though this book is set in the 1800s, I felt that it was still very relevant today, though I would hope women would not be this self sacrificing. Hardy wrote this novel, a social commentary on the lives of nineteenth century English Women. Hardy is an excellent author. His characters are well developed. His writing is full of beauty and skill. This is the second book I have read by him and exceeded Jude the Obscure which I also enjoyed.

[rebeccaclaresmith-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I really, really do not like this book at all and, to be honest, I found the ending concerning her sister a little bit twisted and wrong. How that is supposed to make the misery of the rest of the book okay, I don't know. Yes, it gives you a lot to think about. And yes, it does have a good storyline, but some of the final conclusions just made me want to reinvent the ending for myself as the headstrong protagonist apparently completely lost herself and ended up doing things I would never have expected considering the character that was laid out beforehand.

[achromatic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

read if you enjoy schadenfreude

[donnab317 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely heartbreaking and so beautifully written I wanted to cry.

[steadfastreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I decided to pick up this audio-book for my drive from Chicago to Atlanta. I was pleasantly surprised with how enjoyable it was. I had been dreading this book for a long time, but knew I was going to have to read it eventually if I ever wanted to complete the 1001 Books to Read challenge.

This book was surprisingly modern. Tess is a strong female character. From the beginning she's not afraid to do what is necessary for her family, even when her mother and father seem childish and much more naive than Tess. She takes responsibility for things that she feels are her fault and works extraordinarily hard throughout the entire novel.

Alec d'Urberville is immediately unlikable. This is (naturally) reinforced after he rapes Tess. The language that Hardy uses surrounding the rape is chock full of euphemisms. It probably took me about half of the book to solidly determine that she had been raped and not just seduced.

Angel Clare starts out likable enough, wooing and insisting on Tess to take his hand in marriage, that is until he turns into a total hypocritical ass.

I was rather shocked by the ending.

My only regret is that I didn't read this book sooner.

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

the first 80% of the bookmare rather slow. lots of repetitions and hidden meanings that uounalmost miss the rape until you read that she has a baby. thrn you roll your eyes for a long time while thr main characters are courting and then again when they make themselves miserable. however, the ending was a surprise and for me the best part of the book when Tess finally took some action.

[sweet_serenity · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I feel like this was almost two different books. I was really enjoying the story, sympathising with Tess, and admiring the author's progressive attitudes, when at the very end the whole thing derailed. Before the ending, I would have given the book a 3 star rating. It was engaging, had some complex characters, and really dealt with the idea of the fallen woman in an amazing way. But then....

For me, the story fell apart when Angel returned and found Tess living with the cruel Alec. That was not how I'd imagined the story would go! I'd hoped Alec could be redeemed, and be a genuinely good friend to Tess, if not a lover. That when Angel returned Tess would cast him off, give him a roaring lecture for being such an idiotic hypocrite. His crimes against Tess were far worse than Alec's in my opinion. The majority of this novel was thoughtful and innovative, but the ending read as a trashy, old timey, conservative, romance.

[littlebookworm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I felt so sorry for Tess; she simply could not resist so many things, and no one supported her the way they should have. So many bad things happen to her that it's impossible not to feel for her, especially as most of them are not her fault. Her flaw perhaps is in caring too much for others in addition to the cruelties of fate, and this tragically leads to her end. This book is very Victorian in its depiction of women and how they are completely the property of men -- even in their own hearts. Not a modern viewpoint, but fascinating nonetheless.Hardy's writing, as ever, is beautiful and poignant, and to me enjoyable regardless of the tale he tells. Only rated four stars for its sheer depressing nature, but highly worth a read anyway.