Fiction · 1891
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
A Pure Woman
Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor Wessex family that has just learned it descends from the ancient d’Urbervilles, is sent to claim kinship with a rich family of that name — and the rest of her short life follows from what happens there. Thomas Hardy subtitled the book “A Pure Woman” and published it in 1891, to praise and outrage.
It is the most read of his novels, and with Jude the Obscure the one that made him give up fiction for poetry.
Bibliomancer presents the complete text in its seven “phases”.
Contents
- Explanatory Note to the First Edition
- Author’s Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions
- Phase the First — The Maiden
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- Phase the Second — Maiden No More
- XII
- XIII
- XIV
- XV
- Phase the Third — The Rally
- XVI
- XVII
- XVIII
- XIX
- XX
- XXI
- XXII
- XXIII
- XXIV
- Phase the Fourth — The Consequence
- XXV
- XXVI
- XXVII
- XXVIII
- XXIX
- XXX
- XXXI
- XXXII
- XXXIII
- XXXIV
- Phase the Fifth — The Woman Pays
- XXXV
- XXXVI
- XXXVII
- XXXVIII
- XXXIX
- XL
- XLI
- XLII
- XLIII
- XLIV
- Phase the Sixth — The Convert
- XLV
- XLVI
- XLVII
- XLVIII
- XLIX
- L
- LI
- LII
- Phase the Seventh — Fulfilment
- LIII
- LIV
- LV
- LVI
- LVII
- LVIII
- LIX
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Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Victorian Fiction.
Source mind
About the author
1840–1928 · Victorian
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born near Dorchester, trained as an architect, and turned to fiction in his thirties. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) are set in the “Wessex” he mapped onto the south-west of England. After the reception of Jude he wrote no more novels and devoted his last thirty years to poetry, publishing eight volumes and the verse drama The Dynasts.
Adjacent records
