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Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics)
 
 
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Editor), Margaret Randolph Higonnet (Introduction) "On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining..." (more)
Key Phrases: big beauty, Angel Clare, Izz Huett, Tess Durbeyfield (more...)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
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  • This item: Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics) by Tim Dolin

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Product Description

Edited with Notes by Tim Dolin and an Introduction by Margaret R. Higonnet


About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and wrote both poetry and novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. He died in 1928. Tim Dolin teaches English at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Margaret R. Higonnet teaches English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 592 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics (May 27, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0141439599
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141439594
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #51,701 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #11 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Hardy, Thomas
    #11 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > British > Classics > Hardy, Thomas
    #24 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > British > 19th Century

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Tim Dolin
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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy

Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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First Sentence:
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
big beauty
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Angel Clare, Izz Huett, Tess Durbeyfield, Alec D'Urberville, Dairyman Crick, Joan Durbeyfield, Sir John, Retty Priddle, The Pure Drop, Blackmoor Vale, Jonathan Kail, Mercy Chant, Old Pretty, Talbothays Dairy, Farmer Groby, John Durbeyfield, Old Lady-Day, Emminster Vicarage, New Year's Eve, Queen of Diamonds, The Herons, Vale of Blackmoor, Benvill Lane, Flintcomb-Ash Farm, Froom Valley
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics)
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics) 4.2 out of 5 stars (59)
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Customer Reviews

59 Reviews
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4.2 out of 5 stars (59 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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143 of 151 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars certainly one of the greatest novels ever written, September 23, 2003
By mulcahey (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
I was looking for another edition of TESS and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the "average customer rating" was only three stars. So I'm taking a moment to correct the balance.

TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES must be as close to a perfect novel as anyone has written in English. It is a genuine tragedy with a girl/woman as tragic hero. It is about life on earth in a way that transcends mere sociology. It has the grandeur of Milton but concerns itself with the lives of mortal beings on earth, as much with sex as with dirt, blood, milk, dung, animal and vegetative energies. It concerns itself with only essential things the way the Bible does. It is almost a dark rendering of the Beatitudes.

The story is built with such care and such genius that every incident, every paragraph, reverberates throughout the whole structure. Surely Hardy had an angel on his shoulder when he conceived and composed this work. Yet it was considered so immoral in its time that he had to bowdlerize his own creation in order to get it published, at first. Victorian readers were not prepared for the truth of the lives of ordinary women, or for a great many truths about themselves that Hardy presents.

The use of British history as a hall of mirrors and the jawdropping detail of the landscape of "Wessex" make it the Great English Novel in the way we sometimes refer to MOBY DICK as the Great American Novel, though the works don't otherwise bear comparison. Melville's great white whale is a far punier creation.

Hardy's style is like no one else's. It is not snappy, as Dickens can be. It is not fluid and elegant, like George Eliot's. It can feel labored and awkward and more archaic than either. It has no journalistic flavor, but is painfully pure and deliberate and dense, echoing Homer or the language of the Old Testament rather than anything we think of as "modern." Don't start with TESS but with FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, another very beautiful book, where Hardy is at his loosest and wittiest. Once you have the key to his style, then pick up a good edition of TESS with notes, e.g. Penguin, so you get the full richness of all the literary allusions. Hardy's lowly shepherds and farmhands move and breathe in a very ancient literary atmosphere. The effect is not pretentious but timeless.

There is wisdom, poetry and majesty here. Tess stumbling through the dark and taking her last rest at Stonehenge will send chills up your spine like no other reading experience. I wonder if anyone can know why there are novels, why we care about them, or what they are capable of, without reading this one.

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52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Compellingly sad, November 29, 2004
By Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Recently, my brother and I were discussing the "poverty penalty," the concept that the poor pay more for what they must buy because they have no bargaining power to invite competition, which drives down prices. This is obviously not a new phenomenon, because poor Tess Durbeyfield pays quite a poverty penalty through the course of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

This is the first novel of Hardy's I have read, but I chose it after reading "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" by Daniel Pool, a fabulous book about 18th century daily life.

Hardy's title, as quickly becomes evident, is tongue-in-cheek (he is author of my favorite title of a book, Jude the Obscure, which I haven't yet read) is ironic and mocking. Tess, the lovely and somewhat educated daughter of a cottager in Hardy's British district of Wessex, has the last name of Durbeyfield, but in the first pages of the book, her father, the ne'er-do-well, learns that he is descended from Norman aristocracy, the D'Urbervilles, and there aren't many of them left, except his clan, as the local reverend informs him. He instantly thinks himself very grand and takes it as an excuse to go carousing, which causes Tess and one of her many younger siblings to have to make an early morning journey with the horse for the family's means of making money. Sleeping on the journey, Tess wakes to find the horse impaled in a wreck and killed. Feeling guilty, she agrees to be sent as a poor relation to the Stoke-D'Urbervilles to seek assistance of some kind. (They are "new money" and have bought the name "D'Urberville" to build position for themselves, so they are actually no relation.)

There she encounters Alec D'Urberville, who pursues her vigorously, though she repeatedly eschews his attentions. She takes a job for his mother, watching her fowl, but one evening, separated from her friends in the village on the way home from a Saturday night out in the village, Alec stops accepting no for an answer.

Later she falls in mutual love with a gentleman (the son of a minister) who has rejected the pulpit himself in favor of learning the trade of dairy farming so that he may run his own farm some day. Angel Clare does fall in love with Tess, but at the same time, he doesn't seem to really know her, or want to... he thinks of her as a pure country maid, and has no idea about her past. When she tries to tell him, he shushes her, thinking he knows all about her. When she finally confides in him after the marriage, the results are disastrous and Tess is once again dealing with harsh reality.

I won't recount the rest of the story, but it's clear that the bourgeois (Alec) and the gentry (Angel) have a great deal to do with the pain and hardship of Tess's life; they inflict the poverty penalty on her. The idea of the fluidity of the aristocracy in the 18th century -- Tess is descended from them, but has no rights thereof, Alec has taken the name due to his money, and Angel has rejected the career of his familial role in favor of farming whilst entertaining a very aristocratic (and inaccurate) view of the "peasantry" -- is prominent in the novel, with Tess's inability to care for herself and fulfill her perceived familial goals without resorting to asking for help from those who don't have her bloodline at all. The town of Kingsbere, where Tess's ancestors are said to be buried, figures somewhat in the novel, and one cannot help but think that this symbolizes their use to her as being just as dead as they are.

There are some motifs of paganism in the book... Tess meets Angel for the first time at a May dance, a pagan rite, and she has another climactic plot moment at Stonehenge toward the end of the book. Angel himself seems to reject his father's Christian teachings, and the beliefs of Tess and her society are often deemed superstitious or quaint and encompassing of pagan belief systems. Tess often wishes to be free of her life of burdens, and who can blame her? She didn't cause the horse's death that plunged her into this chain of events, and yet she is punished and punished and punished.

Hardy's writing is beautiful and engaging. The book, though long, seems to quickly move from event to event, and the author's descriptions are enlightening and complete. I really liked this book and look forward to reading more by Hardy.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars So well done, its uncomfortable to re-read., February 1, 2007
I see "Tess" as the story of how a beauty is wronged by evil and by arrogance.

But oh, what a story. Hardy's novels read like poetry. Tess is so lovely, innocent and good, Alec so relentlessly hideous, and Angel so pathetically self-righteous, that I find the gradual destruction of Tess (with whom I empathize) at the hands of these two men, to be difficult to experience again, line by line!

What a masterpiece of the human condition, and I'm told, of the female experience. Hardy's bitterly honest portrayal of the worst and best of human behavior is as powerful as any I've found in literature.

When I need a Hardy fix and I don't want to be depressed, I turn to "Far From the Madding Crowd."
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great British Novel
"Tess of the d'Urbervilles", first published in 1891, is set in Dorset (or "South Wessex" as Hardy called it) during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Read more
Published 1 month ago by J C E Hitchcock

1.0 out of 5 stars what a piece of crap.
i cant believe i wasted my time on this. I picked up this book because i naively thought "Oh! a book about a girl! A teenage girl! I should like this... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Just Jen

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Novel
This is one of my all-time favorite novels. Hardy expects you to be intelligent enough to understand the classical references in his novel without having to explain them to you... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Eric Gundberg

4.0 out of 5 stars A grueling classic
There are many good things I could say about this novel: it is excellently written, the characters are vivid, the message is clear and important, the setting is richly textured... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Y. Lurye

5.0 out of 5 stars Heavenly
Exquisite writing, fascinating story, a rural English world so real it's as if you're walking through it, smelling every meadow and farmyard, hearing every hoof beat and raindrop,... Read more
Published 3 months ago by MarlowesMom

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragically Wonderful
Tess is one of the more depressive novels I've read lately. My wife will attest to the fact that I have a strange affinity to depressing stories. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Chris

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard read
The plight of Tess, a woman from the Victorian 'lower class' is sad. But, what is hard to empathize is her return to the villain who has been forcing his despicable way on her... Read more
Published 8 months ago by blu_matrix

5.0 out of 5 stars Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Once again an excellant service from Amazon. The book is just as I expected. A good quality paper back.

R.V.Angel.
Published 11 months ago by Richard Angel

5.0 out of 5 stars An Impassioned Response to the Church
Thomas Hardy, who wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles, also wrote one of my favorite poems, The Blinded Bird, and another wonderful one called The Darkling Thrush. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Daniel P Miller

3.0 out of 5 stars Give It a Rest
Any woman who has been pursued by the likes of an Alex D'Urberville will appreciate with a shudder his sinister characterization. Read more
Published 14 months ago by ann sherman

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