Book Review of Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Name of Book: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Author: Thomas Hardy

ISBN: 0-553-21168-4

Publisher: Bantam classic

Type of book: rape, 1800s, marriage, values, adult, descendants of wealth, adult

Year it was published: 1891

Summary:

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’Urbervilles is today one of the enduring classics of nineteenth-century literature.

Characters:

I found Tess to be a confusing character and couldn't understand a lot of her actions. Why couldn't she keep her mouth shut about not being a virgin? Doesn't she realize how she'll get treated if she tells the truth? I also couldn't understand why she did what she did with Alec and all.

Theme:

Don't tell someone your sexual history.

Plot:

The story is written in third person narrative from multiple character points of views. The plot seems simple, in that it has the history why things have happened the way they had, but I had to admit that I found the parts where Tess was working boring. I likd the ending sort of, but it rushed on too suddenly and there seemed to be no transition between it. I also liked the division into seven phases and the author stuck closely to the phases.

Author Information:
(from goodreads.com)

born
June 02, 1840 in Stinsford, Dorchester, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom

died
January 11, 1928

gender
male

genre
Literature & Fiction, Poetry

About this author
edit data

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his facination with the supernatural. Though he regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the previously mentioned novel Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Opinion:

Surprisingly I liked the novel, although I found it a boring read when it comes to Tess working and so forth. I think its mainly because I don't care much about the nature descriptions and so forth when it comes to Tess and somehow they sounded boring to me. The parts where Angel interacts with Tess is sweet and I felt sad that he had left her when he learned the truth about her sexual past. I couldn't help but see how hypocritical situation is, and it's not as if Tess had done it willingly. The separation part, I couldn't understand why Tess does the things she does such as refusing money from Angel's family and so forth.

3 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)