The novel tells the story of Tess Durbyfield, the passionate daughter of a tippling peddler and his simple, forgiving wife. The contemporary readers were right on one count: reading Tess for the first time is truly a disturbing experience.
It is a work filled with beautiful evocations of landscape and horrific descriptions of deaths, with acute psychological insight as well as the sense that individual psychology matters little when confronted with an impervious universe. Having previously appeared in a censored, serialized form in The Graphic, early readers and critics were not ready for the full novel’s portrayal of female sexuality, religious skepticism, and scandalous violence.
The 1891 publication of Thomas Hardy’s penultimate novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, was met with a great deal of controversy.
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