Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorites!
Review: Truly an excellently written book. From the very beginning, Tess comes alive. Her parents are witless drunks with two many children, and Tess must care for them. When news comes to her idiot of a father that once the Durbeyfields were the D'Ubervilles, a family with a famous past, money and land, her life takes some terrible turns.

One of the best things about this book is that it is not happy-go-lucky. When terrible things happen to her, Tess has no where to go. If you want to see what life for women was like, you can easily find out through Tess.

The end is very unexpected, and absolutely perfect, and very satisfying as well. I didn't need to know what happened next, I wasn't dying to read a sequel, I was content.

For you people who love happy books, that have happy endings, middles, everything- read something by Jane Austen. If you are into reality, check this book out.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting and heartbreaking
Review: I'm many years out of college and thought I should start reading some more of the classics. Previous favorites of mine have been The Sound and the Fury, Jane Eyre, and Pride and Prejudice. I saw Tess of the D'Urbervilles on my sister's bookshelf and for about a year I considered reading it. Finally, I picked it up and began. Wow! I read it in about three days. I never expected I would feel so much by reading this book. I cried when she baptized Sorrow herself. Her concerns that he be buried in the churchyard and her efforts to ensure he was were touching. I wanted to help Tess Durbeyfield. I thought she was a very complex character--she was sweet and unworldly but she wasn't actually stupid. And she was strong in many ways--for example, her family relied on Tess for so many things--eventually even their support. In fact, I hated her family for not working harder and making their own sacrifices. All the burden was on poor Tess. I also wanted to shake some sense into Angel. He really did wrong by Tess--although he eventually realizes this, it comes too late. The only thing I really did not care for was the sudden inclusion of a minor character (who we met earlier)into the end of the book and the implication that she would play an important role in the future of a major character. I barely knew this minor character and NOBODY could compare to Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If you are reading this to find a good book, ignore the negative reviews by high-school students and buy this book NOW. It's unforgettable.

Rating:
Summary: WARNING - Don't read the Introduction first!
Review: My 1 star rating is due to the fact that Oxford University Press gives away the plot twists and even the shocker ending in the second paragraph of their Introduction. Most of the fun of reading any novel is trying to find out what will happen next. Oxford spoils this by giving it away at the start (what were they thinking?!!!). If you pick up this edition, just skip the Intro, or read it AFTER the book. Otherwise, Hardy's novel is a great story with insight into noble character. Hardy gets 5 stars, Oxford U Press gets 1.

Rating:
Summary: Sad, ambiguous, troubling, and beautiful.
Review: My review is based on the Oxford Classics Edition.

Thomas Hardy seems to have been interested mostly in sad, unhappy characters who lead troubled, disappointing lives, struggle against fate, and lose. There is beauty in artistically represented sadness, though, and notably so if we are only spectators. I am not giving away the ending by writing that "Tess" is a sad novel. I think most people who choose to read this book do so because they know it is a sad story, or they have read Hardy before. In my case, I had to read it for school, and what truly surprised me is the ambiguity that Hardy so masterfully portrays in order to make his heroine more of a real person instead of a mere character. By the book's end we really do not know whether Tess was raped or seduced by Alec; whether he took advantage of a sleeping girl and forced himself upon her, or she allowed it in a moment of weakness, tired after a strenous day and grateful to him for "saving" her from the other workers. However it happened, Tess's life is radically changed after the fact and this event will have grave consequences for her and Alec.

The ambiguity is troubling with the entrance of Angel, the hypocrite who falls in love with Tess because she looks angelic, virginal, and beautiful as a child, but rejects her when she tells him that she is not a virgin (therefore not a child) anymore. Her other qualities are there, but Angel equates purity with virginity --something many people still do when it refers to women-- so he can construct a perfect excuse for his terrible behaviour towards the woman he has said he loved. In spite of the forebodings that Hardy drops before Chapter 35, this particular chapter, at the beginning of Phase the Fifth, is very powerful and almost surprising in its intensity. The level of troubling ambiguity goes up several notches at the end of the novel, when it appears that Angel may indeed get his "little girl" as a replacement for the one he just lost.

"Tess" is a sad and beautiful story. There is much more to write about this novel, but I have decided to concentrate on what Hardy seems to have intended when he wrote so beautifully about so sad a theme, but in such an ambiguous way. He calls Tess "A Pure Woman," and she is that. But as only a truly great writer would, he does not present her as an outright victim: there are plenty of opportunities for Tess to escape Alec before they have sex, and plenty of opportunities for her to deal in a different way with the cruel hand that fate has dealt her. She does not escape Alec, and she chooses Angel (rotten luck with men). There are tragic flaws in Tess, and that is what makes her human while making "Tess" into a true tragedy. Hardy knows this. His prose is elegant and, at times, it reads more like poetry, going from good to beautiful.

This edition of the novel is helpful, but it could be better. I prefer foot-notes rather than end-notes. If they have to be end-notes, they should have numbers. The Introduction by Simon Gatrell is original, although I do not agree with its main premises: that there are two Thomas Hardys at work in "Tess," and that "A Pure Woman" refers not to purity, but to "essential, wholly" woman. This is valid as an opinion but unsupported by evidence. I recommend "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." If you have never read Hardy, read this. If you have read him, you know what to expect.

Rating:
Summary: Tragically Beautiful
Review: Tess's father, Mr. Durbeyfield, is told by a minister that his family is the direct lineage of an old, noble family that was once thought to be completely gone. There's nothing left of the family's land and fortune, except the family name (d'Urberville).

However, Mr. Durbeyfield and his wife see this as a chance to move up on the social ladder. They devise a plan to send their daughter to become acquainted with a rich woman who's last name is d'Urberville. From then on, Tess is left to try to maintain her dignity and honor and to pick up the pieces of her broken life that resulted from her parents' need to be important.

This is my first time reading anything by Thomas Hardy. I was warned that he was cynical man, and I'll agree that Hardy's prose is cynical, yet heartrending. I couldn't help feeling bad for Tess through all her troubles. This is not a happy novel. For a moment, you think that things will get better for Tess, but the fates seem to be against her.

The landscape of the novel changes with the mood of what's happening. The land itself almost seems to be a living person that he described.He uses vivid, beautifully described imagery to describe people and places in his novels. There are themes of theology (Hardy had internal conflicts with believing in God), virtue, the boundaries of love. He employs everything from Greek mythology to modern (or what was modern in his day) poetry.

There are no illusions of a happily-ever-after in this story. This was simply a beautiful novel, a novel that portrays its female heroine as the strong woman she was. She could put more modern women heroines to shame.

Rating:
Summary: a book to get lost in
Review: it truly is an amazing story of love, strength, passion and second chances. I loved it and got into it quite quickly. The characters were developed flawlessly, and the plot is one to remember. Though at times the descriptions of the setting did tend to drag, it didnt take much away from this great piece of literature.

Rating:
Summary: Best fatalistic Victorian novel I ever read in bed
Review: I did not lose any weight, however. I recommend "The South Beach Diet."

Rating:
Summary: Awful...just plain awful!!
Review: Okay...I had to read this book as summer reading...I must say I was actually looking foward to reading it...I thought it would be good...I thought wrong. Tess is one of the most awful books I have ever read...Tess is a sap with no spine and an insult to all women. I understand this book was written in an era when women were not strong but still...couldn't Hardy have given Tess some common sense?? This book put me to sleep more than once with its long descriptions of the same valley...and can anything else happen to Tess at the end of this novel? I think every bad thing that could happen to a woman happened to Tess...a bit melodramatic, maybe? I don't know how this book became a classic...was it classic for its ability to put somebody to sleep...or how about sending someone into a depression or fits of anger because Tess is a moron? If you want to read classics read Crime and Punishment or even Madame Bovary...I also had to read those this summer and I actually enjoyed them...so don't go saying to yourself the only reason I don't like this book is because I was forced to read it...I was forced to read those other books and I liked them. In short, I pity anybody who has to read this book...and I don't know how anybody in their right minds could have given this book 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Excellently read by Bron
Review: I have to be honest. Though a great lover of all of Hardy's fiction, I wasn't a big fan of Eleanor Bron's. (Perhaps I remember too vidily her sneering character in Ken Russell's 'Women in Love'.)

But Bron's sensitive reading of this tragedy is a revelation which had me totally enveloped. Tess comes across as a pitiful, humbly righteous creature whose destiny seems inevitably gloomy almost from the first minute. The male parts (mainly D'Urbeville and Angel Clare) are equally well read and clearly differentiated.

Tess's silent suffering is the antithesis of today's modern, assertive woman, but is no less noble.

This reading lasts six full CDs, but I wished it were even longer. (I have previously bought a two-CD version, but that necessarily eliminates much of the subtlety of the book.)

If you're studying this novel for an exam, this is the ideal version to get well acquainted with the story.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Most Extraordinary Novels Ever
Review: Despite its seemingly needless tragedy, its persistently downbeat tone, and its relentlessly persecuted heroine, Thomas Hardy's 1891 novel, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," is without doubt one of the greatest novels I have ever read. And I have read a few. Tess is the only truly well-developed character in the novel, which, coupled with the fact that Hardy renders the landscape of Wessex as to make it a character itself, gives one the sense of a real struggle between humanity and nature. This, for me, is one of the great themes of the novel - the tension between nature and the artifices with which we fill our relations with other people. The beauty of Hardy's pastoral setting is never idyllic - Hardy keeps us always aware that human society, with its false moral standards and technological advancements, is ever encroaching upon the already vanished past.

As the novel begins, Tess Durbeyfield's irresponsible wastrel of a father is casually and jokingly informed by the local minister that he is a descendant of a long-degenerated and disenfranchised noble family, the D'Urbervilles, whose influence stretches back to the Norman invasion. This simple, careless act, nothing more than a name, wreaks such havoc upon everyone in the novel, that I'm actually having a hard time right now even looking at the title - the name itself, now having read the novel, is such a powerful condemnation of status, of privilege, of reputation, of all the injustices of English society from the eighteenth century through the time of this novel, almost the dawn of the twentieth. Sent by her nearly indigent parents, whose heads have swelled with the possibilities of lineage, Tess leaves her home in Marlott, going to claim kinship with the last apparently wealthy D'Urberville, in the village of Trantridge. There she meets Alec D'Urberville, who seduces her. The rest of this powerful novel shows Tess Durbeyfield attempting to piece together a reputable life out of a situation and a condition in which respectability is fundamentally denied her.

"Tess" is a novel steeped, perhaps even choked, with tradition - history, literature, theology, philosphy, economics - Hardy's frame of reference calls all of these to account through the course of the novel. Tess, ostensibly a simple country girl, is forced to reckon with the accumulated weight of human knowledge and thought, no small burden for a girl with only the kind of basic education available in a small rural town. As readers, we are asked to measure the applicability, the efficacy, of the Bible next to Shakespeare, next to Greek mythology next to art - to determine if any of these are capable of fathoming what it means to be human, to endure the myriad experiences of human life, both good and ill.

In her dealings with the changeable Alec D'Urberville, the almost-modern Angel Clare, the farm-hands Izz Huett and Marian, her poor, practically minded mother, Joan, Tess experiences so much of life, mostly of the harshest kind. For me, this is the key facet of the novel. Tess endures. Despite all of her hardships, which are hard indeed, and in the face of the worst kinds of scrutiny and deprecation, both from others and from herself, Tess exhibits a kind of composure, threshold for pain, and strength that are all quite amazing. Daniel Defoe's eighteenth-century "Moll Flanders" is the first character that immediately comes to mind, just in terms of comparable pluck in the face of such overweaning odds.

Though many may disagree with me, I think that Tess, more than simply being the protagonist of the novel, is a real heroine. She is so insistently admirable, so determined to live despite all the forces and pressures arrayed against her from the very outset of the novel, when as a 15 year old girl, she is asked to restore the family's fortunes - it is really just astounding. I regret that I had never read "Tess" before, but I am supremely glad that I have had the chance to do so now. A novel cannot get a higher recommendation from me.