What is Tess of the d'Urbervilles about?

Tess Durbeyfield, the eldest daughter of a poor Dorset family, is sent by her family to seek kinship with the wealthy d'Urbervilles — a family whose ancestral name her father has been told they share. What follows is the story of Tess's rape by Alec d'Urberville, her subsequent attempt to build a new life, her marriage to Angel Clare on the assumption that her past need not define her, Angel's rejection of her when he discovers her history, and the slow catastrophe that follows. Hardy subtitled the novel "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," and the subtitle is a polemic: Victorian society would not call Tess pure, and Hardy argues at length that it should.

The novel is a sustained indictment of the sexual double standard that held women responsible for violations committed against them while excusing the men who committed them. Hardy's case is built carefully: Alec is manipulative and eventually repentant in a way the novel treats with deliberate irony; Angel Clare, the liberal intellectual who loves Tess's purity in principle and abandons her for it in practice, is if anything judged more harshly. The gap between Angel's progressive ideals and his actual behavior is one of Hardy's sharpest observations about the Victorian moral imagination.

The prose reaches moments of genuine beauty in its landscape writing — Hardy's Dorset is particularized to the degree that it becomes almost a character — and the novel builds toward its ending with the logic of a Greek tragedy: every step Tess takes to recover her life narrows the space available to her. The Stonehenge scene at the end is simultaneously over-the-top and exactly right, a moment where the mythic register Hardy has been preparing breaks fully into the open.

Hardy was attacked for the novel's frank treatment of rape and its radical defense of Tess's moral purity. By contemporary standards the portrait has some paternalism — Hardy loves Tess intensely and speaks for her rather than through her — but the anger that drives the novel is real and the argument it makes is still being made. Readers who can tolerate tragic endings and prose with weight will find it one of the Victorian era's most affecting novels.