Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

10/10

I finished this book a little over a week ago. It had been on my to-read list for years. Years. It was a dandy. A royal dandy.

Let us make this one quick (Spoilers abound). Tess is raped by this Alec fellow, has a baby that dies, goes to work at this farm as a milkmaid, meets Angel, falls in love but resists his requests for marriage due to her past, finally concedes, gets married, tells him of her impure past on their wedding night, he freaks, abandons her for over a year, she suffers tremendously, eventually submits to Alec the rapist's badgering due to a lack of any other viable options, Angel finally comes back and realizes how poorly he treated Tess, finds her, she refuses to go with him, she then goes and murders Alec by stabbing him in the heart, runs back to Angel and tells him that she can now be his now that Alec is no longer living, they go on the lam for like a week until she is finally apprehended and put to death for her crime.

The book was awesome. This was my first ever Thomas Hardy book and I am now a fully converted Hardy Boy, as it were. His writing was magnificent and captivating and heartbreaking. The book was written in the late 1800's and went against the then societal views of sexual misconduct in females and the double standard that is involved. A woman who is raped (against her will) is considered impure and becomes an outcast. Some sad stuff. In the end, old Tessie was broken and had lost all sense of what was right and what was wrong and what would please her Angel. I like the full title to the book, which is "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented." I recommend this book, but seeing as I gave everything away, I probably ruined all the fun for the rest.

I leave you with the final paragraph written by Thomas Hardy in his Explanatory Note to the book: "I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book's opinions I would ask any too genteel reader who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome's. 'If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.'"