In the Library
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy, 1891
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 59
- Length
- Length 148k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in AEschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Hawthorne pins the same scarlet letter on a woman and watches a community decide her punishment.
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About the book
Hardy called her a pure woman, and Victorian England never forgave him the phrase. Tess Durbeyfield, a country girl sent to claim kinship with a rich family who bear her ancestors' noble name, is ruined by a man who takes what she will not give. She buries the child, returns to work as a dairymaid in the green Vale of Talbothays, and there meets Angel Clare, who loves her purely until the night she tells him what was done to her. Then he leaves. The whole book aches with the injustice of it: that a world will worship a woman's beauty and damn her for surviving the worst it does to her. Hardy writes the Wessex fields and seasons with such tenderness that the cruelty cuts deeper against them. Read it for Tess herself, who keeps her goodness when goodness has cost her everything, and for the slow gathering dread of where such a world must finally drive her.