Recommendations
Books Like Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Best books to read after Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is one of the most morally serious novels in English — Hardy's argument, in his subtitle 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,' that society's condemnation of Tess is wrong and that the novel will not pretend otherwise. If Hardy's indignation and his Wessex landscape moved you, these books share his portrait of women destroyed by societies that make the rules and punish those who violate them.
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's final and most controversial novel — Jude Fawley, a working-class mason who dreams of university, and his relationship with his freethinking cousin Sue Bridehead; so savagely critical of Victorian marriage and education that it was burned by a bishop and contributed to Hardy's abandonment of novel-writing; the most direct companion to Tess in its argument that aspiration is punished by the social order
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's first major success and the most romantic of his novels — the independent Bathsheba Everdene and the three men who love her in the Wessex countryside; more hopeful in outcome than Tess and the most accessible entry point to Hardy's world; the novel that established the Wessex landscape as the great tragic setting of Victorian fiction
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian parallel to Tess — a married aristocratic woman who chooses passionate love over social convention and is destroyed by the society she inhabits; Tolstoy's Anna is higher in social station than Tess but equally exposed to the double standard that condemns women for what men do freely; the comparison reveals how the same social logic operated across very different European national contexts
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
Eliot's semi-autobiographical novel about Maggie Tulliver — a young woman of unusual intelligence in a world that will not let her use it, whose passionate nature leads to a catastrophic flood ending; the most direct parallel to Tess among Victorian novels in its portrait of a woman destroyed by the gap between her inner life and the social world that refuses to acknowledge it
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë's novel about a woman who escapes an abusive marriage — one of the first English novels to argue for a woman's right to leave her husband, written 43 years before Tess; it makes the same argument about the sexual double standard that Hardy makes in his subtitle, and is equally controversial for its time in its refusal to pretend that Victorian marriage was what it claimed to be
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 American novel about Edna Pontellier, a married woman who awakens to her own desires and the impossibility of fulfilling them within her social world — the American contemporary of Tess in its portrait of female desire as incompatible with social survival; banned on publication and then forgotten for half a century before its rediscovery as a feminist classic
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's masterpiece about the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the provincial town of Middlemarch — the broadest and most sympathetic portrait of women's frustrated ambition in the Victorian novel; where Tess is a tragedy of a single woman's destruction, Middlemarch is a comedy of how intelligent women survive (or fail to) within the same social constraints
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's novel about Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who sells his wife and daughter while drunk and spends the rest of his life trying to recover from the consequences — the most Shakespearean of Hardy's novels in its tragic-fall structure and its portrait of a man who understands what he has done wrong but cannot stop repeating it; the Hardy novel that most directly illuminates the author's tragic moral vision
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