In brief
A Wessex haggler is told by a passing parson that he descends from a Norman family, and from that piece of idle antiquarianism everything follows. His daughter Tess is sent to claim kin with rich people who merely bought the name; their son Alec takes her in the woods at night; her baby dies; she recovers, works as a dairymaid and falls in love with Angel Clare, a parson’s son who has given up the Church. On their wedding night she tells him about her past, and he leaves her. Hunger and her family’s eviction drive her back to Alec. When Angel returns she stabs Alec, has a few days of happiness with her husband in an empty house, and is arrested at Stonehenge and hanged.
Told like that it is a melodrama of the ruined maid. What makes it something else is the subtitle: A Pure Woman. The whole novel argues for those three words, against the moral common sense of its first readers and against the man in the book who ought to agree.
The argument
Hardy tells the story of the subtitle himself in the 1912 preface: it was “appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs”, as “an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book.” Purity, for this novel, is not a physical record. When she walks the fields at Marlott, pregnant and ashamed, the narrator says flatly that “She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment” (ch. 13), and that “But for the world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education” (ch. 15). When Angel finally learns the same lesson, in Brazil, it comes as a sentence about “aims and impulses” rather than deeds (ch. 49). It has taken him fourteen chapters and it arrives too late to help anyone.
Which leads to the novel’s real provocation. Alec d’Urberville is the obvious villain and does the obvious damage, but he behaves as his type behaves and nobody expects better. The man who destroys Tess is the good one. Angel has read the advanced books and given up Cambridge and ordination for the sake of his doubts (ch. 18). On the wedding night he confesses his own “eight-and-forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger” (ch. 34), she forgives him at once and tells her story, and he answers: “You were one person; now you are another” (ch. 35). The narrator’s diagnosis is the most severe in the book: this “advanced and well-meaning” young man remains a “slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings” (ch. 39), with “a hard logical deposit” under all the gentleness (ch. 36). Hardy’s point is that opinions change far faster than reflexes, and that a woman can be killed in the gap.
The scene in The Chase is left open. Tess is “sleeping soundly” when Alec returns to her (ch. 11); the narrator turns away to ask “where was Tess’s guardian angel?” and to talk of a “coarse pattern” traced on a blank surface. Readers have argued ever since whether this is rape or seduction, and Mary Jacobus has suggested that the blur was partly forced on Hardy by what could be printed. Later Tess tells Alec that “My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all” (ch. 12). The novel’s moral case does not wait for an answer, and that is its strength: whichever happened, Hardy says, she is the same person afterwards.
The shape of the book
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is laid out in seven named phases, and the names are worth reading as a sequence: The Maiden, Maiden No More, The Rally, The Consequence, The Woman Pays, The Convert, Fulfilment. They read like the headings of a moral tract until the last, the bitterest word in the book, since what is fulfilled is the gallows.
The plot is built on near misses. The confession she writes and pushes under his door slides “beneath the carpet” and is never read (ch. 33). She walks to Angel’s parents, loses heart at the door, overhears his brothers on the road and watches the boots she hid being carried off for charity (ch. 44). This is method rather than coincidence, as Hardy had already said: “the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving” (ch. 5). When Angel at last finds her at Sandbourne, she says “Too late, too late!” (ch. 55).
The deeper structure is repetition. Tess is asleep each time the world closes in: at the reins when Prince is killed, in The Chase, on the stone at Stonehenge. And the same colour keeps coming back. Prince’s blood leaves her “splashed from face to skirt” (ch. 4); a text-painter daubs vermilion warnings on a stile (ch. 12); the garden at Talbothays leaves “madder stains” on her arms (ch. 19); the threshing machine is a “red tyrant” (ch. 47); she draws Alec’s blood with a glove in the same chapter; and at the end the landlady sees a red stain spread on her ceiling until it looks like “a gigantic ace of hearts” (ch. 56). Tony Tanner traced this pattern in a famous essay of 1968, and J. Hillis Miller built a whole reading on the book’s repetitions in Fiction and Repetition (1982).
The voice
Hardy’s prose is not smooth, and readers who want it to be will have a hard time. He writes “Thermidorean weather” in a sentence about a dairy. “Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale” (ch. 24) is both slightly absurd and completely right; you can smell it. The clumsiness is the sound of a largely self-educated builder’s son holding all his reading and everything he knows about Dorset in one hand, and his eye rarely fails: the “spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light” of the dawns at Talbothays (ch. 20), or the Arctic birds at Flintcomb-Ash, “gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes” (ch. 43).
Tess “spoke two languages”, dialect at home and ordinary English abroad, and between her and her mother the narrator sees “a gap of two hundred years” (ch. 3). When she tells Angel what she feels about life he is startled to hear “the ache of modernism” in a milkmaid’s words (ch. 19).
There is a trouble in the voice, too, and I think it is the novel’s most interesting one. At dawn Angel sees in her “a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form”, and calls her Artemis and Demeter. “Call me Tess,” she says (ch. 20). Hardy understands exactly what is wrong with this: it is the error that will wreck them. But his narrator cannot stop doing it himself. He lingers on her mouth and her arm; he tells us that “a field-woman is a portion of the field” (ch. 14). Feminist critics such as Penny Boumelha have pressed on this, and they are right to. The book defends Tess against one kind of possession while practising another.
The land and the work
Few novels know as much about what work does to the body. In the “Valley of the Great Dairies” (ch. 16) the milking is communal, the food is good, and desire rises with the sap. At Flintcomb-Ash the women hack swedes in sleet on a starve-acre farm (ch. 43). Then the steam thresher arrives, and Tess is put on top of it for a day that runs her body to its limit (ch. 47).
It is easy to forget, because the ending is so loud, that Tess goes back to Alec for an economic reason. When her father dies, the lease on the cottage dies with him and the family is put out on the road at Lady Day; they end up camped against the wall of the church where the d’Urberville ancestors lie, in a bed under the family window (ch. 52). Alec is the only person offering a roof. Older critics read the book as an elegy for a dying peasantry. Raymond Williams, in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, corrected that: Tess is not a peasant but an educated member of the rural working class, and what crushes her is not the machine so much as the mixture of landed money, liberal idealism and Christian morals she runs into when she tries to live.
The people
Tess Durbeyfield
Tess is proud, capable, quick to blame herself and slow to ask anything of anyone. Her pride is the part adaptations tend to lose. She refuses Alec’s money, will not go back to Angel’s parents after the first failure, and works in sleet rather than complain. When she strikes Alec with her glove she tells him what she takes to be the rule of her world: “Once victim, always victim” (ch. 47). “I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self!” (ch. 35) is the whole novel’s question in one line. Her last words, “I am ready” (ch. 58), go to policemen who have waited for her to wake.
Angel Clare
Angel Clare is the portrait of a certain English liberal, and it has not dated. He plays a “second-hand harp”, loves ideas, wants to farm for the sake of independence, and marries a dairymaid partly as a proposition. At the end he changes, sincerely and uselessly.
Alec d’Urberville
The name is fake: Alec’s father, Simon Stoke, a merchant from the North, “annexed” it from books on extinct families (ch. 5). So a sham d’Urberville ruins a real one, and the real one gets nothing from her blood but the vault. His brief conversion under Angel’s father collapses when he sees her again: “You temptress” (ch. 46), he says, handing over the blame.
Joan Durbeyfield and the dairymaids
Joan is not a fool. Her advice by letter, “on no account do you say a word” (ch. 31), is the worldly wisdom Tess ignores; had she obeyed it there would be no tragedy. Tess’s cry to her after Trantridge, “Why didn’t you warn me?” (ch. 12), is unanswerable all the same. Marian, Izz and Retty love Angel too and suffer for it, and they are the only people who behave well to Tess without being asked.
’Liza-Lu
Tess asks Angel to marry her young sister, because “she is so good and simple and pure” (ch. 58). That word returns at the very end, in Tess’s own mouth, as if she had never read the title page. The closing image has Angel and “a spiritualized image of Tess” walking hand in hand (ch. 59), a union that English law at the time forbade, since a man could not then marry his dead wife’s sister.
How it was made
The Bolton syndicate Tillotson’s had planned to run it, perhaps as Too Late Beloved, and backed out; Macmillan’s Magazine, through Mowbray Morris, objected to its “succulence”. Hardy then cut the novel to fit the Graphic, in his own words with “cynical amusement”, and it ran from 4 July to 26 December 1891 without the seduction, the baby or the baptism. Tess in that version was tricked by a form of marriage, and Angel crossed the flood with the dairymaids in a wheelbarrow, for fear of what carrying them might suggest.
The three-volume book came out from Osgood, McIlvaine in November 1891 with almost everything restored. Hardy went on revising for twenty years; the 1912 Wessex edition, which this Gutenberg text follows, added the “few pages” in chapter 10, on the Saturday night at Chaseborough, that he says had been overlooked. Behind the novel stood at least one real memory. At sixteen Hardy watched the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester, a woman who had killed a violent husband, and he never forgot it.
Readers and critics
It sold enormously and scandalised plenty. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Henry James in disgust, and James agreed the book was “vile”. Mowbray Morris, the same man who had turned it down, attacked it unsigned in the Quarterly Review of April 1892, and Hardy wrote in his diary that “A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.” The 1892 preface mocks a critic who objected to “a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals”.
That phrase is the novel’s most contested sentence. “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (ch. 59). People take it for Hardy’s philosophy, a universe with a sadist at the top. But look at the quotation marks around Justice. They point at the court at Wintoncester, at the state, not at the sky. The gods in this book are a figure of speech; the hanging is an administrative act, carried out at eight in the morning with a flag.
Afterlives
Lorimer Stoddard’s stage version made a Broadway triumph for Minnie Maddern Fiske in 1897. Frederic d’Erlanger’s opera opened in Naples in 1906, and its run was cut short by an eruption of Vesuvius, which would have pleased the author.
Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), with Nastassja Kinski, won three Academy Awards; his wife Sharon Tate had given him the book. The BBC’s 2008 serial starred Gemma Arterton and Eddie Redmayne. Michael Winterbottom moved it to modern India in Trishna (2011). The plot travels: wherever a girl’s value is held to be a fact about her body, it still runs.
How to read it
- Do not hurry through the farm work. The milking and the swede-hacking are not background; they are where the argument about nature and law is actually carried out.
- Read chapters 34 to 36 in one go. Two confessions and one verdict make the hinge of the book, and Angel’s cruelty is most frightening in its calm.
- Choose a scholarly edition for the notes. Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics both explain the Wessex places and what Hardy changed between versions; the Gutenberg text is complete and carries the 1912 preface.
Read next
- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895). The same anger turned on marriage and the university, with less consolation and no landscape to soften it.
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853). The earlier and gentler defence of a seduced girl, which shows how far Hardy pushed the argument.
- George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859). A dairy, a squire’s son and a dead baby, told by a novelist who still trusts in moral growth.