NovelVictorian · 1891Study guide · no full textSteady

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hardy subtitles it 'A Pure Woman' and then spends the book proving the subtitle — against the world of the novel. Read the landscape as a witness that never intervenes.

Gender Class Fate Nature

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

“A little less than a god, a little more than a man.”

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

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Class — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Tess Durbeyfield

Country girl, and a family's unlucky heir

Tess of the d'Urbervilles · Thomas Hardy

Wants: To be judged by what she intended rather than by what happened to her.
Undone by: She blames herself with the exact vocabulary the world has taught her.

Angel Clare

Clergyman's son, and a free thinker

Tess of the d'Urbervilles · Thomas Hardy

Wants: A farming life built on honest work and modern ideas.
Undone by: His free thought has never been tested against his own desire.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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