- Fiction, Man-woman relationships, fiction, Poor families, fiction, Women murderers, fiction
An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a journey that will see her victimized by lust, poverty, and hypocrisy. Shaped by an acute sense of social injustice and by a vision of human fate cosmic in scope, her story is a singular blending of harsh realism and poignant beauty. Thomas Hardy created in Tess not a standard Victorian heroine but a woman whose intense vitality shines against the bleak backdrop of a dying way of life. The novel shocked contemporary readers with its honesty and remains a timeless commentary on the human condition.
Log it
Sign in to log this.
Character
Earnest, grave, prestige and classical in form.
- earnestironic
- gravecomic
- unpretentiousprestige
- classical in formformally daring
- cooloverwhelming
Who loves it, who doesn't
No profiled raters yet.
Ask the title
A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
No reviews yet.
About the book
- Author
- Thomas Hardy
- First published
- 1920
- Pages
- 457
- Publisher
- HarperCollins Publishers, Barnes & Noble, Incorporated, Classic Books
- Editions
- 747
- Language
- Japanese, German, Polish, Russian
- ISBN
- 9798542422077
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 38 have read it and 161 want to.
“THIS novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book, and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe.”
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, during his lifetime he was much better known for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, which earned him a reputation as a great novelist. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional land of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored trag
Similar in taste
Closest on the same fourteen dimensions, from everything scored on Tastebuds Other media included when they land close.
Shuggie Bain 201986% alikeBoth earnest, grave, classical in form.
Giovanni's Room 195683% alikeBoth earnest, grave, prestige.
The Scarlet Letter 180080% alikeBoth earnest, grave, prestige.
A Prayer for Owen Meany 198979% alikeBoth earnest, grave, prestige.
Girl, interrupted 199378% alikeBoth earnest, grave, classical in form.
The Nickel Boys 201978% alikeBoth earnest, grave, prestige.
Both earnest, grave, prestige.
Young Mungo 202278% alikeBoth earnest, grave, classical in form.
This Sporting Life 196387% alikeFilm · Both earnest, grave, prestige.
Ugetsu 195384% alikeFilm · Both grave, earnest, prestige.