Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest of Hardy's Novels, 10 Sep 1999
By A Customer
'Tess' is probably the most famous of Hardy's novels and is undoubtedly one of the best. Hardy focuses on Tess as a 'pure woman' - a sentiment that shocked readers at the time, but is the perfect description in the mind of the modern reader.The story flows well, and characters are beautifully developed and constructed. Hardy's description of Tess's time at Talbothay's dairy is brilliantly evocative and creates a sense of peace, pleasure and security within the reader. The characters of Angel Clare and, also, Alec, are wonderfully portrayed, while Tess is an immortal and memorable character. The eventual outcome of events is extremley moving. Tess, herself, is one of the greatest literary characters ever created.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Pure Heart Corrupted, 9 Feb 2003
Tess Durbeyfield is not a lucky girl. We meet her as a lively but naïve country girl, untouched by the wanton wiles of mid 19th Century England; but the thoughtless words of a local parson turn her parents thoughts towards riches and status and for this, Tess bears the brunt of their folly at the hands of the unprincipled and reckless Alec D'Urberville. Despite bringing scandal upon her family, she continues to drudge herself through life and meets the kindly and moral Angel Clare, who falls deeply in love with Tess and declares his intention to marry her. But Tess hides a terrible secret, how will Angel take her revelation?Thomas Hardy evokes rural Wessex with surefooted deftness; and the image of Tess and her fellow village girls dancing together in white dresses on the village green is one that echoed for me, right to the end of the novel, and filtered back to me as I read the final paragraph. Truly an irresistible novel.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you're an adolescent... or still feel like one..., 26 Oct 2006
I have to give Tess five stars because no book I have read before or since has moved me to such a degree. Thirty years later I still have my original copy, entirely disintegrated, the glue dissolved, very possibly by my hot adolescent tears. It simply tore me apart - I remember in particular struggling to finish Tess's letter from Flintcomb-Ash through eyes blurred with grief and that after finishing the book I was well-nigh inconsolable for days. I spent the following summer touring the Dorset locations on my bicycle as a kind of pilgrimage, and remember those cruel hills pretty well too.
But having said that, I was sixteen at the time and emotionally wide open. Reading it five years later, I could hardly get past the clumsiness and infelicities in the writing and the crude manipulation and melodrama of the plot. How could I have fallen for this? Reading it again another ten years further on I better understood the theatricality of it - it should be read in some ways like the old ballads with which Hardy was very familiar, with their highly exaggerated representations of good and evil - but the magic had gone.
Maybe the key is that Tess is a book written by an emotional adolescent - Hardy was a writer who arguably never really grew up, and his own relationships seem to bear this out - which speaks most forcefully to other adolescents. The melodrama and the suffering, the torment and the injustice which Tess is put through really are meat and drink to the average sensitive sixteen year old, but seem perhaps a bit foolish in retrospect.
But this isn't really a criticism. 'Tess' is by far the greatest of Hardy's novels and the high point of his career as a novelist (Jude the Obscure would tip over into self parody) and is written with a rare passion - Hardy said that he loved Tess and, although he perhaps had a funny way of showing it, his depth of feeling for his creation really comes through. Like 'The Catcher in the Rye', if you're in the right demographic - a sixteen year old or someone who still feels like one - you're going to love it. If not, you may wonder what all the fuss is about and should perhaps move straight on to Dickens.
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