Reading Order
Tess of the d'UrbervillesThomas Hardy Novels Reading Order
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891) is one of the most powerful and disturbing novels in the English tradition — the story of Tess Durbeyfield, a young country woman who is raped by the aristocrat Alec d'Urberville, loses the resulting child, falls in love with the idealistic Angel Clare, and is destroyed by a society that refuses to allow her the title 'pure' after what was done to her. The subtitle is Hardy's defiant argument.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Complete Tess of the d'Urbervilles Book List
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy·1891·The novel — originally published in bowdlerized form in a family magazine (Hardy had to restore the excised scenes for publication); the subtitle 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented' was Hardy's argument against Victorian society's condemnation of Tess; best read alongside Hardy's later, even more controversial novel Jude the Obscure. - 2Buy
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy·1895·Hardy's final novel — the story of Jude Fawley, a working-class mason who dreams of going to university, and his relationship with his freethinking cousin Sue Bridehead; considered Hardy's masterpiece by many critics and so controversial on publication that it was burned by a bishop and contributed to Hardy's abandonment of novel-writing. - 3Buy
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy·1874·Hardy's first major success — the independent Bathsheba Everdene and the three men who love her in the Wessex countryside; the most romantic of Hardy's novels and the most accessible entry point to his Wessex world; more hopeful in outcome than Tess. - 4Buy
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy·1878·Hardy's novel about Clym Yeobright's return to Egdon Heath and the tragedy of his marriage to the ambitious Eustacia Vye, who wants to escape the heath and finds herself trapped; considered by many the most perfectly constructed of the novels, with Egdon Heath as one of the great symbolic landscapes in English fiction. - 5Buy
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot·1860·George 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 final catastrophe; the most natural parallel to Tess among the Victorian novels in its portrait of a woman destroyed by the gap between her inner life and the social world. - 6Buy
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy·1877·Tolstoy's portrait of a married Russian aristocrat who chooses passionate love over social convention and pays the ultimate price — the European parallel to Tess in its portrait of a woman judged and destroyed by the society she inhabits for choosing love over propriety; Tolstoy's Anna is higher in social station but no less exposed to the same double standard that condemns women for what men do freely. - 7Buy
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë·1848·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.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles — Frequently Asked Questions
In what order should I read Thomas Hardy?
For first-time readers, Far from the Madding Crowd is typically recommended: it is the most romantic and accessible of the major novels, and the most optimistic; it introduces the Wessex landscape and Hardy's characteristic pastoral setting without the unrelenting tragedy of the later works. The recommended sequence for the novels is roughly: Far from the Madding Crowd → The Return of the Native → The Mayor of Casterbridge → Tess of the d'Urbervilles → Jude the Obscure. The short stories (particularly 'The Three Strangers' and 'The Withered Arm') are also excellent and can be read at any point. Jude the Obscure is typically read last as the darkest and most explicit statement of Hardy's view of the relationship between human aspiration and social constraint.
Is Tess of the d'Urbervilles a feminist novel?
Hardy did not use the word 'feminist,' but Tess is one of the most explicitly feminist novels in the Victorian canon in its argument — stated baldly in the subtitle 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented' — that Tess's rape did not make her impure, and that the society that condemns her is wrong. Hardy is unambiguous about the injustice: Alec d'Urberville, who raped Tess, faces no social consequences; Angel Clare, who abandons his wife when she tells him what was done to her (having himself confessed to a sexual liaison before their marriage), is treated by the social world as perfectly reasonable. Hardy called the novel a 'sermon' in fictional form, and its argument is as clear as its tragedy: that Tess is destroyed not by her own actions but by a social order that holds women to standards it does not apply to men.
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