Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: An Overview

When Tess of the D'Urbervilles was published in book form in 1891, at first it was highly criticized, but English intellectuals welcomed it. The novel tells the story of a maid who is seduced and, at the end, kills her seducer, in a narration that can be regarded as a very traditional ballad plot.

Plot Summary

Due to the discovery by John Durbeyfield of his family descending from a Norman noble lineage, Tess is sent by his parents to claim kinship with another family named D'Urberville, without knowing that this is a family of new rich people who come from another part of the country, where they bought the name in order to look more respectable. She is welcomed by Alec Stoke d'Urberville, a young man who immediately takes a fancy to her. He refuses Tess as part of the family but invites her to go to work in his property, where he repeatedly tries to seduce her until he leads her into the forest where he violates her.

Tess returns to her parents and gives birth to Alec's son, who is sick and dies shortly after. Then Tess goes to work at the Talbothay factory, where people do not know anything about her story. Here is Angel, the son of a rebellious preacher who is learning to make the farmer, despite his family's disapproval. He and Tess fall in love and marry, but Angel is later troubled by the discovery of what she has gone through with Alec and flees to Brazil to go far and reflect.

After Angel's departure, Tess copes with difficult times, moving from here to there, working in different places. Alec returns and once again claims for her, but once again Tess rejects him, until his father's death, which leaves the family homeless and hopeless. Alec gives them a place to live in his estate as long as Tess lives with him as a wife.

Angel comes back from Brazil to find out that Tess lives with Alec. The situation makes her aware of how Alec has always used and abused her, they argue and she kills him. She runs away with Angel and spends some days with him, before being caught and carried to the place of execution. She asks Angel to take care of her younger sister, Liza, as a wife, after her death; the final scene sees two figures moving away from the town of execution and pausing for a moment, prostrated in Stonehenge, while a dark black flag is hoisted downhill. They are Angel and Liza, sorrowful shadows in the fog.

Context and Setting

Besides the plot, of which someone maintains that it could be trivial if it was not set in the beautiful natural environment shown by Hardy, it is necessary to make some features of Hardy’s living context clear. He carried on his activity as a novelist and poet in a period of transition. He was born in 1840 in a village near Dorchester, in the beautiful south-west of England, that area which he...