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Tess of the d’Urbervilles – study guide

plot summary, characters, video, and resource materials

Thomas Hardy - portrait

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her.

This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page. This is Hardy at his best.

Plot summary

Jack Durbeyfield, a poor carter, is stunned to learn that he is the descendent of an ancient noble family, the d’Urbervilles. When his horse is killed in an accident he and his wife send Tess to the d’Urberville mansion, where they hope Mrs. d’Urberville will make Tess’s fortune. In reality, Mrs. d’Urberville is no relation to Tess at all: her husband simply changed his name to d’Urberville after he retired. But Tess does not know this, and when the rakish Alec d’Urberville procures Tess a job tending fowls, Tess feels she has no choice but to accept, since she blames herself for the horse’s death.

She spends several months at this job, resisting Alec’s attempts to seduce her. Finally, Alec takes advantage of her in the woods one night after a fair. Tess returns home to give birth to Alec’s child, which dies soon after it is born. Tess then spends a miserable year at home before deciding to seek work elsewhere. She finally accepts a job as a milkmaid at the Talbothays Dairy.

At Talbothays, Tess enjoys a period of contentment and happiness. She befriends three of her fellow milkmaids – Izz, Retty, and Marian – and meets a man named Angel Clare. They grow closer, and she eventually accepts his proposal of marriage. But she feels she should tell Angel about her past, and writes him a confessional note. She slips it under his door but it slides under the carpet and Angel never sees it.

On their wedding night, Angel and Tess both confess indiscretions. Angel tells Tess about an affair he had with an older woman in London, and Tess tells Angel about her history with Alec. Tess forgives Angel, but Angel cannot forgive Tess. He gives her some money and boards a ship bound for Brazil.

Tess has a difficult time finding work and is forced to take a difficult job at an unpleasant farm. She tries to visit Angel’s family but overhears his brothers discussing Angel’s poor marriage, so she leaves. She hears a wandering preacher speak and is stunned to discover that he is Alec d’Urberville, who has been converted to Christianity by Angel’s father, the Reverend Clare. Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec begs Tess never to tempt him again. Soon after, however, he asks Tess to marry him.

Tess learns from her sister Liza-Lu that her mother is near death, and Tess is forced to return home to take care of her. Her mother recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies soon after. When the family is evicted from their home, Alec offers help. But Tess refuses to accept, knowing he only wants to obligate her to him again.

Angel Clare returns from Brazil prepared to forgive his wife. He finds Tess in an expensive boardinghouse where he begs her to take him back. Tess tells him he has come too late. She was unable to resist and went back to Alec d’Urberville. Angel leaves in a daze, and, heartbroken to the point of madness, Tess goes upstairs and stabs her lover to death. When the landlady finds Alec’s body, she raises an alarm, but Tess has already fled to find Angel.

They hide out in an empty mansion for a few days, then travel farther. When they come to Stonehenge, Tess goes to sleep, but when morning breaks shortly thereafter, a police search party discovers them. Tess is arrested and sent to jail. Angel and Liza-Lu watch as a black flag is raised over the prison, signaling Tess’s execution.

Study resources

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Oxford World Classics edition

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Kindle eBook edition

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Wordsworth Classics edition

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – a hypertext version

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy

Tess – film version by Roman Polanski

Thomas Hardy: A Biography – Michael Millgate’s definitive study

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – 2008 BBC dramatisation on DVD

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – York Notes (Advanced)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Brodies Notes

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Cliffs Notes

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – 1998 BBC dramatisation on DVD

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – audioBook at LibriVox

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Principal characters

Jack Durbeyfield	dissolute head of family, with wife and large family
Joan Durbeyfield	his hardworking wife
Tess Durbeyfield	their eldest daughter
Eliza Louisa Durbeyfield	Tess’s younger sister, who closely resembles her
Angel Clare	bookish third son of a clergyman who becomes Tess’s husband
Alec Stokes-d’Urberville	rakish but later reformed son of estate owners
Richard Crick	owner of Talbothay Farm where Tess meets Angel
Car Darch	former mistress to Alec
Farmer Groby	churlish employer of Tess at Flintcombe-Ash farm
Sorrow	illegitimate child of Tess and Alec, who dies

Film version

Roman Polanski’s film version of Tess (1979) was shot in Brittany rather than England – to get round the extradition laws between the UK and the US from which he has been in exile since 1977, after jumping bail when charged with raping a 14 year old girl. It is beautifully faithful to the original novel and particularly unsparing in its depiction of country life as hard manual work – which chimes sympathetically with the unsentimental views held by Hardy himself.

The centrepiece is an outstanding performance by seventeen year old Natassia Kinski (Klaus Kinski’s daughter) who was Polanski’s lover at the time. She is astoundingly beautiful without seeming to ever realise it, which is exactly one of the causes of Tess’s downfall in the novel.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Thomas Hardy - manuscript page

Manuscript of The Mayor of Casterbridge

Literary criticism

Beer, Gillian. ‘Descent and Sexual Selection: Women in Narrative. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. by Scott Elledge. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991: 446-451.

Bloom, Harold. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Casagrande, Peter J. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

Laird, J. T. The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

LaValley, Albert J. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Mills, Sara, ed. Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading. New York: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Parkinson, Michael H. The Rural Novel: Jeremias Gotthelf, Thomas Hardy, C.F. Ramuz. New York: P. Lang, 1984.

Van Ghent, Dorothy. ‘On Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. in The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Widdowson, Peter, ed. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Thomas Hardy. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993.

Wright, Terence. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hampshire: Macmillan Publishers, 1987.

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy is a good introduction to Hardy criticism. It includes a potted biography of Hardy, an outline of the stories, novels, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early influential full length study by D.H. Lawrence to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Hardy journals.

Thomas Hardy's study

Hardy’s study (Dorset Museum)

Other novels by Thomas Hardy

Click jacket covers for further details at Amazon

Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) was Hardy’s first success as a novelist. It’s a light and gentle evocation of pastoral life. It depicts the world of an agricultural Britain which Hardy saw being transformed by the industrial revolution. Modern readers might find the love interest a bit soppy, but the picture of the Melchester church musicians and their resistance to change is touchingly humorous. It enabled Hardy to express his affection and love for the Wessex countryside. Structurally divided into Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, it follows the natural rhythms of the earth and of rural society. This is one for either the complete beginner to Hardy, or for devotees who wish to flesh out their knowledge of the early stages of his career as a novelist.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first of Hardy’s novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. Heroine and estate-owner Bathsheba Everdene is romantically involved with three very different men. The dashing Sergeant Troy, who is handsome but unreliable; Farmer Boldwood, who is honourable but middle-aged; and man-of-the-soil Gabriel Oak, who is worthy and prepared to bide his time. The conflicts between them and the ensuing drama has lots of plot twists plus a rich picture of rural life.

The Return of the Native (1878) It’s often said that this is one of the most Hardyesque of all the novels. There are some stand-out characters: Eustacia Vye, a heroine who patrols the moors looking out for her man through a telescope; Clym Yeobright, a hero who can’t escape his mother’s influence; and Diggory Ven, an itinerant trader who wanders in and out of the story covered in red dye. Improbable coincidences and dramatic ironies abound – and over it all presides the brooding presence of Egdon Heath. But underneath the melodrama, there are profound psychological forces at work. You need to be patient. This is one for Hardy enthusiasts – not beginners. This edition, unlike any other currently available, retains the text of the novel’s first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is probably Hardy’s greatest work – a novel whose aspirations are matched by artistic shaping and control. It is the tragic history of Michael Henchard – a man who rises to civic prominence, but whose past comes back to haunt him. This is not surprising, because he sells his wife in the opening chapter. When she comes back unexpectedly, he is trapped between present and past. He is also locked into a psychological contest with an alter-ego figure with whom he battles both metaphorically and realistically. Henchard falls in the course of the novel from civic honour and commercial greatness into a tragic figure, a man defeated by his own strengths as much as his weaknesses. There are strong echoes of King Lear here, and some of the most powerfully dramatic and psychologically revealing scenes in all of Hardy’s work.

The Well Beloved (1892) is set in the stone quarries of Portland Bill – one of the strangest parts of Hardy’s Wessex. The hero is a sculptor (that’s the link with stone) who improbably beds a woman, her daughter, and grand-daughter at twenty year intervals on the implausible pretext that they look similar. This is blatant authorial wish-fulfilment on Hardy’s part (and he did eventually marry a woman forty years his junior). It’s one for specialists – or the psychiatrist.

The Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.

Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s last major statement before he gave up writing novels for good. Hero Jude is intellectually ambitious but held back by his work as stonemason and his dalliance with earthy Arabella. When he meets his spiritual soulmate Sue Brideshead, everything seems set fair for success – except that she is capricious and sexually repressed. Jude struggles to do the right thing – but the Fates are against him. The outcome is heart-rendingly bleak and tragic.

Wessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. Stories such as ‘The Withered Arm’, ‘The Son’s Veto’, and ‘The Distracted Preacher’ explore many of the themes of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more fully in his novels.

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