Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Violated by one man, forsaken by another, Tess Durbeyfield is the magnificent and spirited heroine of Thomas Hardy's immortal work. Of all the great English novelists, no one writes more eloquently of tragic destiny than Hardy. With the innocent and powerless victim Tess, he creates profound sympathy for human frailty while passionately indicting the injustices of Victorian society. Scorned by outraged readers upon its publication in 1891,Tess of the d'Urbervillesis today one of the enduring classics of nineteenth-century literature.

Thomas Hardy was born near Egdon Heath in Dorset, in 1840, the eldest child of a prosperous stonemason. As a youth he trained as an architect and in 1862 obtained a post in London. During this time he began seriously to write poetry, but <i>Under the Greenwood Tree</i> (1872), his first Wessex novel, did well enough to convince him to continue writing. In 1874, <i>Far from the Maddening Crowd</i>, published serially and anonymously in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, became a great success. Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874, and in 1885 they settled at Max Gate in Dorchester, where he lived the rest of his life. There he wrote <i>The Return of the Native</i> (1878), <i>The Mayor of Casterbridge</i> (1886), <i>Tess of the d'Urbervilles</i> (1891), and <i>Jude the Obscure</i> (1895). With <i>Tess</i>, Hardy clashed with the expectations of his audience; a storm of abuse broke over the "infidelity" and "obscenity" of this great novel he had subtitled "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented." <i>Jude the Obscure</i> aroused even greater indignation and was denounced as pornography. He published <i>Wessex Poems</i> in 1898, <i>Poems of the Past and Present</i> in 1901, and from 1903 to 1908, <i>The Dynasts</i>. Hardy died in 1928.