Tess of the d'Urbervilles

First published in book form in 1891, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman whose life is shaped by poverty, social convention and the consequences of an encounter that alters her future. Sent by her family to seek assistance from the wealthy d’Urbervilles, Tess finds herself caught between the demands of survival and the expectations imposed upon women in Victorian England. Her later love for Angel Clare offers the possibility of renewal, yet his ideals of purity and his inability to reconcile them with Tess’s past expose the cruelty of a society quick to judge and slow to forgive. Set amid the fields, villages and changing seasons of Hardy’s imagined Wessex, the novel gives the English countryside a beauty that is inseparable from its hardships.

Subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, Hardy’s novel challenged the moral conventions of its age, insisting on Tess’s dignity in the face of social condemnation. Its treatment of sexual double standards, class, religion and the indifference of fate made it controversial on publication, while its tragic power helped secure its place among the great works of Victorian fiction. Hardy combines a keen eye for rural life with a profound sense of human vulnerability, allowing landscape, chance and social custom to shape the course of individual lives. Among his most celebrated novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles remains a deeply moving indictment of the unequal judgements through which society determines who deserves compassion.

From the book

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

On Tess of the d’Urbervilles

“The greatest tragic writer among English novelists.”

— Virginia Woolf, on Thomas Hardy