Novel
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
Opening lines
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
One evening in May, Jack Durbeyfield, a small-time hawker from Marlott, in Wessex, learns from an antiquarian parson that he is descended from the d'Urbervilles, an old knightly family from Normandy. He celebrates the news at the inn, and his eldest daughter, Tess, has to drive the beehives to market by night; on the way, the mail cart kills the horse. Eaten up with remorse, she goes to claim kinship with some wealthy Stoke-d'Urbervilles, who took that name from books. The son, Alec, has her taste strawberries; a letter in his mother's name soon engages her to look after the poultry.
Context
Several periodical editors rejected the novel on moral grounds before The Graphic accepted it in a cut version: the seduction scene disappeared, every mention of the child was removed, and the editor demanded that, instead of carrying the farm girls in his arms along a flooded road, the character wheel them across in a wheelbarrow. The author placed two of the cut episodes elsewhere as independent stories, and restored them to their place in the volume published in three volumes in November 1891.
Who it is for
A long novel, subtitled “a pure woman”, a phrase that asserted the heroine's virtue; translated into French as early as 1901.
Prizes and reception
Received with mixed reactions in 1891 and 1892, the Saturday Review finding it unpleasant, while others defended it.
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