Starvard.Starvard.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Tess is a poor country girl whose family discovers they are distant relatives of a rich family, and that discovery ruins her life in stages. She is wronged by men, judged by everyone, and keeps working and hoping anyway. Hardy wrote it to make readers angry at a world that punishes the wrong person, and it still works.
Tess Durbeyfield is a poor farm girl whose father learns they descend from an ancient noble family. Sent to claim kinship with a rich household, she falls into the hands of the charming, rotten Alec d'Urberville, and her life is quietly ruined. Years later she finds real love with Angel Clare, and confesses her past on their wedding night. He cannot forgive in her what he has done himself.
Hardy built the book as an argument. Tess is good, hardworking, and loyal, and none of it saves her, because her world punishes a woman for things that were done to her. Chance steps in too: a confession letter slid under a door slips beneath the carpet, unread. Hardy asks whether anyone is truly in charge of a life.
It is still read because Tess herself is unforgettable: proud, tender, and worn down by inches. Watch how the landscape darkens with her fortunes, and how the color red follows her through the book. By the final scene at Stonehenge, you can count the small closed doors that led her there.
Tess Durbeyfield is a poor country girl whose family discovers they are descended from ancient nobility, and that discovery ruins her life. Thomas Hardy's novel follows Tess through betrayal, hard labor, and a love that comes too late, asking why the world punishes the innocent. It scandalized Victorian England and still stings today.
The first chapter
The main portion of the following story appeared—with slight modifications—in The Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.
T. H.
November 1891.
The main portion of the following story appeared—with slight modifications—in The Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.
T. H.
November 1891.
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1891. Author died 1928. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp