Tess of the D'urbervilles: A Pure Woman (Penguin Classics S.) - Softcover

Hardy, Thomas; Dolin, Tim

3.83

283,249 ratings by Goodreads

9780140435146: Tess of the D'urbervilles: A Pure Woman (Penguin Classics S.)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014043514X ISBN 13: 9780140435146

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1998

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As a boy Thomas Hardy had been no stranger to poverty; and he unfolds his story of Tess, struggling to overcome the pitfalls that poverty and ignorance strew in her way, with peculiar intensity. In doing so, he mounts an assault on conventional victorian society's pharisaic morality, its unforgiving religion and rigid class system, and mourns the desecration by the machine of traditional agricultural life. Of all Hardy's novels TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES provides a particularly interesting example of the extent to which Hardy was obliged to bow to the dictates of late victorian morality.

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Review:

"Thomas Hardy's thrilling story of seduction, murder, cruelty and betrayal" (The Times)

"Like the greatest characters in literature, Tess lives beyond the final pages of the book as a permanent citizen of the imagination... Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting" (Irving Howe)

"Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles has a lush sensuality about the heat of summer and the heat of lust which makes the gorgeousness of Hardy's heroine and his country of Wessex both seems utterly desirable as the tale of tragic fate unfolds" (The Times)

"Hardy never used his "country" and his Greek ambitions to better effect" (Melvyn Bragg)

"Tess's beauty and the effect that it has on others gave me a sense of the destructive power of sex" (Rufus Wainwright)

From the Publisher:

The Broadview Editions series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, lesser-known literature. Newly type-set and produced on high-quality paper in trade paperback format, the Broadview Editions series is a delight to handle as well as to read.

Each volume includes a full introduction, chronology, bibliography, and explanatory notes along with a variety of documents from the period, giving readers a rich sense of the world from which the work emerged.

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