I started this read thinking that I hadn’t read it before, but in actuality, I’ve now read it twice, once in school about thirty years ago (but I have no hope of ever remembering that), and once a few years ago when I blogged about it on JOMP. However, despite my gappy memory, I still enjoyed this read this time around, picking up on different aspects as I went through it again.
Hardy is not typically thought of as a “happy” read, but Tess is not too tragic – at least in my opinion. It’s not happy, that’s true – but I think if you view the narrative arc through the lens of a Victorian reader (especially a female middle class Victorian reader), Tess is certainly one of the more flawed characters, having a checkered less-than-spotless past.
At the same time, she is such a good person that, with modern eyes and a modern sensibility, it’s hard to see the objections that some readers in the nineteenth century came up with. (Sorry – ending with a preposition there.)
Not much to say that hasn’t been reported before, did find this little nugget for you from Goodreads:
The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy’s serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
Other Hardy reviews on JOMP are here:
Under the Greenwood Tree – Thomas Hardy (1872)
Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (1874) (earlier review)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (1891)
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