Tess of the d'Urbervilles Study Guide

Thomas Hardy was raised in a small, rural village in Dorset. His father was a stonemason and his mother educated Hardy until age eight. His family was too poor to pay for university, so Hardy became an architect's apprentice until he decided to focus on writing. His stories are generally set in the Dorset area. In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, and her death in 1912 had a profound effect on him. In 1914 he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale. Hardy's first few novels were unsuccessful, and even his later works were controversial and often censored. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure drew such an outcry for their sexual frankness and social criticism that Hardy stopped writing fiction, focusing instead on his poetry. He is best known for Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. He died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is set in England in the first part of the Long Depression (1873-1879), so in general life is especially hard for the poor characters of the book. English society was also going through some major changes during this time. Most important for the novel are the shift from an agricultural to an industrial culture, which is emphasized in the novel as a tension between nature and modernity, and the decline of the old aristocracy. Old names like “d'Urberville” didn't mean much in terms of power anymore, except as status symbols that could be purchased by the newly wealthy, like the Stokes. The sexual morality of the day was also very conservative, a fact that made Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented seem that much more shocking to Hardy's critics.

Hardy is considered a Victorian Realist like George Eliot, the author of Middlemarch, but he was also influenced by the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and the social critiques of Charles Dickens, author of Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities. Hardy's style prefigures Modernist works like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and his writing influenced D. H. Lawrence, especially his books The Rainbow and Women in Love.