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  2. Although now considered a major novel of the 19th century, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England. The novel is set in an impoverished rural England, Thomas Hardy's fictional Wessex.

    • Thomas Hardy
    • 1891
    • Overview
    • Summary
    • Analysis

    Tess of the d’Urbervilles, novel by Thomas Hardy, first published serially in bowdlerized form in the Graphic (July—December 1891) and in its entirety in book form (three volumes) the same year. It was subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented because Hardy felt that its heroine was a virtuous victim of a rigid Victorian moral code. Now considere...

    After her impoverished family learns of its noble lineage, naive Tess Durbeyfield is sent by her slothful father and ignorant mother to make an appeal to a nearby wealthy family who bear the ancestral name d’Urberville, supposedly introduced to England by one of the Norman knights of William the Conqueror. Tess, attractive and innocent, is seduced by family’s dissolute heir, Alec d’Urberville, and secretly bears a child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy.

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    Later working as a dairymaid, she meets and marries Angel Clare, an idealistic man who rejects Tess after learning of her sexual past on their wedding night. Emotionally bereft and financially impoverished, Tess is trapped by necessity into giving in once again to d’Urberville, but, overwhelmed by feelings of injustice when Angel returns to her, she murders d’Urberville. Tess is later arrested and executed.

    Tess of the D’Urbervilles is as famous for its heroine as for its notoriously tragic plot. Originally shunned by critics upon its publication in 1891 because of “immorality,” the novel traces the difficult life of Tess Durbeyfield, whose victimization at the hands of men eventually leads to her horrific downfall. Tess spares the reader none of the bitterness inherent in English country life, and Hardy’s often romanticized love for the landscape of Wessex is balanced by the novel’s grimly realistic depiction of social injustice. A prominent subtext in the novel is the enclosure of the English countryside and the mechanization of agriculture, with landlord farmers, often absentee, turned rural peasant families from lands that they had worked for generations, as happens to the Durbeyfields in the course of the novel. Hardy also criticized the growth of religious sectarianism in making the decidedly unpalatable Alec d’Urberville a “Ranter” preacher, a practitioner of Primitive Methodism.

    In Tess, Hardy presents a world in which the human spirit is battered down by the forces, not of fate, but of social hierarchy. Tess’s eventual death, one of the most famous in literature, is a direct result of human cruelty and as such represents one of the most moving indictments of the lives of 19th-century English women in all of literature.

  3. A short summary of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

    • Thomas Hardy
    • 1891
  4. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a novel written by Thomas Hardy, first published in serialized form in 1891 and later as a complete work in 1892. The novel tells the tragic story of Tess Durbeyfield, a poor peasant girl in rural England, who discovers that she is a descendant of the once-noble d’Urberville family.

  5. Tess Durbeyfield lives in the rural village of Marlott in southwest England. She first appears performing the May-Day dance, where she exchanges a meaningful glance with a young man named Angel Clare. Tess's family is very poor, but her father learns that he is descended from the d'Urbervilles, one of the oldest, noblest families in England.

  6. The plot primarily begins when Mr. Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, learns that his family is descended from the noble d’Urberville family of old. This revelation motivates Mr. Durbeyfield to concoct a plan to take advantage of this newfound prominence and marry Tess into wealth.

  7. Jul 12, 2023 · Tess of the d'Urbervilles explores themes of social class, gender, fate, and the power of societal conventions. The novel is a critique of Victorian morality and the double...

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