Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy(1891)
Novelc. 400 pages
“Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.”
One great work, every day
by Thomas Hardy(1891)
“Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.”
Thomas Hardy(1891)
Tess Durbeyfield, peasant girl with aristocratic ancestry, is seduced, abandoned, married, abandoned again, and finally hanged for murder. Hardy called it 'a pure woman faithfully presented' and the adjective provoked outrage. The novel traces how society, circumstance, and male desire destroy a woman whose only crime is existing. Hardy's Wessex landscape broods over every scene; the ending, at Stonehenge, has the weight of ritual sacrifice. This novel, along with Jude, made Hardy abandon fiction for poetry.