Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Published 1891 · 572 pages · 149,866 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Drama, Literary Fiction, Victorian Literature

How hard is Tess of the d'Urbervilles to read?

Tess of the d'Urbervilles scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
Victorian literary prose with agricultural vocabulary and archaic Wessex dialect terms.
Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
Hardy periodic sentences can be elaborate but narrative momentum carries the reader forward.
Abstraction: 58 out of 100
Philosophical themes grounded in physical setting. Hardy makes meaning visible through landscape and action.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Carefully paced narrative with detailed agricultural scenes. Information accumulates through observation.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
Omniscient narration with clear moral sympathy. Hardy addresses the reader directly at times.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Rich natural symbolism: the bloodstain, Stonehenge, seasonal cycles. Setting functions as moral commentary.
Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
Hardy sympathizes intensely with Tess while maintaining ironic perspective on other characters and society.
Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
Tragic arc announced early and fulfilled without ambiguity. Hardy makes his fatalism explicit.
Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
Linear narrative following Tess through seven phases. Conventional Victorian novel structure.

How Tess of the d'Urbervilles is regarded

Tess of the d'Urbervilles holds a literary regard score of 88 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Tess of the d'Urbervilles sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (270 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Tess of the d'Urbervilles scores 68 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.
Symbol: Formal
The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its inhabitants the races thereof.
Mythos: Tragedy i (Calumniated Woman) (tragedy i)
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
Genre: Novel + Romance
Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest

Where the story of Tess of the d'Urbervilles takes place

  • Hardy's Wessex (Blackmoor Vale, the Froom Valley, Flintcomb-Ash, Sandbourne, Stonehenge), c. 1870s-1880s (1870 to 1890), the main setting
  • Interior Brazil near Curitiba (Angel's exile), c. 1870s-1880s (1870 to 1890)

6 things that are true of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, with the passage for each

  1. Tess's father's horse Prince is killed when the morning mail-cart drives into her unlit waggon while she sleeps.

    The morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and unlighted equipage.

  2. Tess baptizes her dying unbaptized baby herself, naming him Sorrow.

    “SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

  3. Tess's written confession never reaches Angel because she pushes it under his door and beneath the carpet.

    The carpet reached close to the sill, and under the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint white margin of the envelope containing her letter to him

  4. Alec's death is discovered through a growing red stain on the landlady's ceiling.

    The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.

  5. Tess is arrested at Stonehenge by a party of sixteen men.

    “It is no use, sir,” he said. “There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.”

  6. The execution is signalled by a black flag raised on the prison tower just after eight o'clock.

    A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.

Scenes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles that Frye would name

57 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
But the essence of things had changed. Angel's recognition of what Tess has told him pivots the story from romance to estrangement.
Point of epiphany, untitled
“Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an altar.” Stonehenge, a pagan sun-temple, is the structural summit where Tess is arrested.
Pathos, untitled
A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag. Tess's execution, the sacrificial death of the heroine, shown only by the flag.
Alazon, untitled
Sir John d’Urberville—that’s who I am Durbeyfield's vain boast of his ancestry makes him the comic braggart whose pride starts the plot.
Displacement, untitled
The May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was there called. A seasonal fertility rite survives in realistic village custom, a textbook displacement.
Pharmakos, untitled
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. Her execution makes her the scapegoat of society and the gods.

Books that share these scenes with Tess of the d'Urbervilles

About the author

Thomas Hardy