Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

About the book

Tess Durbeyfield's family hopes to improve its position after learning of an apparently distinguished ancestry. Those hopes place Tess in circumstances where social power and vulnerability matter far more than a name. Hardy follows her through work, attachment, and attempts to build a future while other people impose meanings on her past. The rural landscape changes with seasons and forms of labour, giving bodily effort a central place in the narrative. The novel questions judgments that claim moral clarity while applying unequal standards to women and men. Its compassion is joined to an acute sense of how chance, economic need, and inherited expectations restrict action. Tess's desire for ordinary happiness becomes a measure of the society that makes such happiness difficult to secure.

• Social judgment
• Gender and power
• Chance

Why read it

For Hardy's vivid attention to a woman's lived experience beneath the abstractions by which others judge her.

English text