Tess Of The D'urbervilles - Softcover

Thomas Hardy's beautiful and spirited heroine is driven to her tragic end by three men who betray her trust: John Durbeyfield, her drunken, feckless father; the seducer Alec d'Urberville, who leaves Tess pregnant at 16 with a son that dies in infancy; and Angel Clare, the unforgiving husband who rejects her. Abandoned in so many ways, Tess suffers all the hypocrisy and injustice of Victorian morality that Hardy himself despised. When Angel returns from abroad, humbled and hoping for reconciliation, Tess makes a fateful bid to be reunited with the one person she has never ceased to love.

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the Dorset village of Higher Bockhampton. Hardy began novel-writing in the hope that it might finance his transition from architect to poet. The first of his so-called Wessex novels, Far From the Madding Crowd, enabled him to fulfil that hope. A series of Wessex novels would follow, with the later ones (especially Tess of the d'Urbervilles) the subject of much adverse comment by Victorians offended by Hardy's liberal social attitudes. Hardy's work would continue to push the boundaries until his death in 1928.