Recommendations
Books Like Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Best books to read after Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1891 masterpiece follows Tess Durbeyfield from her rape through her brief happiness with Angel Clare to her eventual execution, presenting her throughout as a 'pure woman' whose moral goodness exceeds that of every man in the novel. These recommendations extend the experience through Hardy's other Wessex novels, through Victorian fiction that shares its indictment of the sexual double standard, and through European naturalist fiction that portrays the destruction of women by the societies that formed them.
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's final novel (1895) and the essential companion to Tess: where Tess is destroyed by the sexual double standard and Alec D'Urberville's predation, Jude Fawley is destroyed by the class system and the institution of marriage. Both novels are Hardy at his most direct and most controversial — both were condemned as immoral at publication, and both are devastating portraits of the way Victorian society destroys the people who don't fit its codes.
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Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1874 breakthrough novel — Bathsheba Everdene, an independent woman who inherits a farm and must navigate the attentions of three men: the steady shepherd Gabriel Oak, the reckless Sergeant Troy, and the wealthy but obsessive Boldwood. Far from the Madding Crowd is Hardy's most romantically generous Wessex novel — the Wessex world before Hardy's darkening vision — and Bathsheba is the female character in Hardy who most fully escapes destruction.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1886 novel — Michael Henchard, a prosperous hay-trusser who drunkenly sells his wife and daughter at a fair, and the slow, inexorable consequences of that act as his fortunes rise and fall and rise again. The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy's most classical tragedy, driven by character rather than social critique — but it shares Tess's interest in the way a single disastrously wrong action determines the course of an entire life.
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The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1878 novel — Eustacia Vye, the passionate, unconventional woman trapped on Egdon Heath who wants more than her world can offer, and the disastrous marriage that destroys her. The Return of the Native is Hardy's most mythologically ambitious Wessex novel: Egdon Heath is practically a character in itself, and Eustacia is Hardy's first major tragic heroine — the predecessor to Tess in the gallery of women destroyed by their world's refusal to accommodate them.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian companion: Eliot's 1871 study of four interconnected lives in a provincial town, centering on Dorothea Brooke whose exceptional intelligence and feeling are progressively constrained by her world and her own disastrous choices. Where Hardy shows a woman destroyed by what is done to her, Eliot shows a woman limited by what she is permitted to choose — but both novels are elegies for the women their Victorian world failed.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 American companion — Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires and the impossibility of satisfying them within the social structure of New Orleans society. The Awakening and Tess of the D'Urbervilles are often paired as the two great turn-of-the-century novels about women who are destroyed by the gap between their inner lives and their social worlds — Hardy in rural England, Chopin in Creole Louisiana.
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Une Vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's first novel (1883) — the French companion: Jeanne de Lamare, a young aristocratic woman who marries in hope and spends the next forty years watching her illusions collapse. Both Hardy and Maupassant are writing about the systematic destruction of a woman by the men around her and the indifference of the social world, and both refuse to sentimentalize or console their readers about what they show.
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian companion in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century novel about a woman destroyed by society's sexual codes: Anna Karenina is Tess's closest rival for the position of the greatest tragic heroine in European fiction. Both are women of exceptional qualities who transgress the sexual codes of their worlds and are destroyed by the consequences — though Tolstoy makes Anna complicit in her destruction in a way Hardy refuses to make Tess.
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