A Pure Woman: "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"

by Thomas Hardy

Overview

A Pure Woman "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891 and in book form in 1892.

The novel is set in impoverished rural England, Thomas Hardy's fictional Wessex, during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Tess is the oldest child of John and Joan Durbeyfield, uneducated peasants; however, John is given the impression by Parson Tringham that he may have noble blood, since "Durbeyfield" is a corruption of "D'Urberville", the surname of a noble Norman family, then extinct.

The news immediately goes to John's head. That same day, Tess participates in the village May Dance, where she meets Angel Clare, youngest son of Reverend James Clare, who is on a walking tour with his two brothers. He stops to join the dance and partners several other girls. Angel notices Tess too late to dance with her, as he is already late for a promised meeting with his brothers. Tess feels slighted.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, novel by Thomas Hardy, first published serially in bowdlerized form in the Graphic (July—December 1891) and in its entirety in book form (three volumes) the same year. It was subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented because Hardy felt that its heroine was a virtuous victim of a rigid Victorian moral code. Now considered Hardy’s masterwork, it departed from conventional Victorian fiction in its focus on the rural lower class and in its open treatment of sexuality and religion.

SUMMARY:

After her impoverished family learns of its noble lineage, naive Tess Durbeyfield is sent by her slothful father and ignorant mother to make an appeal to a nearby wealthy family who bear the ancestral name d’Urberville. Tess, attractive and innocent, is seduced by dissolute Alec d’Urberville and secretly bears a child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy. Later working as a dairymaid, she meets and marries Angel Clare, an idealistic gentleman who rejects Tess after learning of her past on their wedding night. Emotionally bereft and financially impoverished, Tess is trapped by necessity into giving in once again to d’Urberville, but she murders him when Angel returns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9786057748904
Publisher:	E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books
Publication date:	01/01/1900
Pages:	462
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Thomas Hardy, (born June 2, 1840, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England-died January 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset), English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.

Early Life And Works
Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason and jobbing builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an isolated cottage on the edge of open heathland. Though he was often ill as a child, his early experience of rural life, with its seasonal rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing. He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to schools in Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good grounding in mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, and in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday, he moved to London and became a draftsman in the busy office of Arthur Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to Dorset by ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth architect G.R. Crickmay.

Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest. His habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic skills. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form in later volumes (e.g., "Neutral Tones," "Retty's Phases"), but when none of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly turned to prose.

In 1867-68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which was sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never published. George Meredith, as a publisher's reader, advised Hardy to write a more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the contemporary "sensation" fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much more distinctively his own. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own father shortly before Hardy's own birth.

Date of Birth:

June 2, 1840

Date of Death:

January 11, 1928

Place of Birth:

Higher Brockhampon, Dorset, England

Place of Death:

Max Gate, Dorchester, England

Education:

Served as apprentice to architect James Hicks

Table of Contents

Phase the First: The Maiden

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Phase the Second: Maiden No More

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Phase the Third: The Rally

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

Phase the Sixth: The Convert

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

LI

LII

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment

LIII

LIV

LV

LVI

LVII

LVIII

LIX

Editorial Reviews

• "A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."
• "Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized."
• "Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!"

― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

From the Publisher