Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928) - English novelist who initially wanted to be a poet but turned to novel writing when he could not get his poems published. Hardy, who wished to be remembered merely as “a good hand at a serial,” re-turned to writing poetry after earning enough money to forego fiction. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) - Tess Durbeyfield goes to work for the wealthy Mrs. D’Ur-berville and is seduced by Alec, the son of the house. This tragic novel shows how crass circumstances can dictate people’s destinies.
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
PREFACE.
Explanatory Note to the First Edition.
THE main portion of the following story appeared- with slight modifications in the “Graphic” newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the “Fortnightly Review” and the “National Observer,” as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.
THIS NOVEL being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of
protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive spirit in which Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1 has been received by the readers of England and America would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an
achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand. etc........
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