Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Summary
Tess Durbeyfield, sixteen and the eldest child of a poor rural family newly convinced of a grand ancestral name, is sent by her parents to claim kinship with the wealthy d'Urbervilles, only to have Alec d'Urberville, the family's son, take advantage of her isolation and her youth in the woods one night, leaving her pregnant and disgraced by a village that blames her rather than him. Her infant dies soon after birth, and Tess rebuilds a life for herself as a dairymaid at Talbothays, where she falls genuinely in love with Angel Clare, an idealistic clergyman's son who marries her without knowing her history; when she confesses it to him on their wedding night, expecting the same confession he has just made about his own past affair to be met in kind, Angel cannot forgive her and abandons her for Brazil. Years of hard, grinding labor and a family plunged back into poverty eventually drive Tess back into Alec's orbit, and she becomes his mistress out of desperation just as Angel, chastened and finally ready to forgive her, returns to find her lost to him. In a final act of fury at everything Alec has cost her, Tess stabs him to death, and she and Angel spend five days together in hiding, including a night sheltering among the stones of Stonehenge, before the police find them at dawn. Tess is arrested, tried, and hanged, and the novel's last image is Angel and Tess's sister 'Liza-Lu watching the black flag rise over the prison from a hill outside town.
Hardy subtitled the book A Pure Woman and builds the whole novel as a direct argument with the reader over that word, daring anyone to judge Tess by the same harsh standard her own world applies to her. It is a patient, often painful book, its rural detail as exact as anything Hardy wrote, and the accumulating unfairness of Tess's story gives it a moral force that stays uncomfortable rather than softening with distance.
Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown at sixteen, a woman convicted of killing her abusive husband, and the memory is widely credited with shaping Tess's ending.
Historical Context & Significance
The Graphic serialized a censored version of the novel through 1891 before Hardy published it complete in three volumes that same year and as a single volume in 1892. Reception was mixed and often hostile: the book's open challenge to Victorian sexual morality scandalized many reviewers, and both Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson recorded strong objections to it, Stevenson describing his own reaction as violent.
The novel is now counted among the major English novels of the nineteenth century, and its blunt treatment of the double standard applied to Tess helped push Hardy, wearied by the reception to it and to Jude the Obscure four years later, to abandon novels for poetry for the rest of his career. It has drawn repeated adaptation, including Roman Polanski's 1979 film and a BBC television version in 2008, and Hardy himself wrote and staged a theatrical version in 1924, casting a local Dorset actress he considered the truest embodiment of the character he had imagined.