Rating: 
Summary: The Dullest book I've read in my life
Review: I am a high school English honors student, so I was forced to read this piece of crap. I'm sorry but this book just put me to sleep. Now that was last year, this year I am now required to read Jude the Obscure, another Hardy "classic" Jude and Tess are like the same person!! These characters seriously need to get some opinions or something because they are the most mindless people in literature. period.
it's not that i don't enjoy reading, It's my favorited thing in the world, but it's material like Hardy's drawning out, over discriptive on the most obscure things that really drives me nuts!
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful
Review: I had to write a review just to bring up a rating that was unfairly knocked down by a handful of obtuse reviewers. I wasn't an English lit major like some of these reviewers, but I have read upwards of 10,000 books in my life -with a concentration on literature- and have to say that the descriptive writing in "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" is the most beautiful and poetic I have yet encountered. It is not the most exciting, nor the most stunningly transformative(that honour goes to "Altas Shrugged") book, but the construction and execution is exquisite.The book is in fact slowly paced - so much so in the first couple of chapters that I was rebuffed the first time I started reading it. However, a little patience will grant you entry into the gorgeous spell Hardy invokes. Yes, it is a "victorian" novel, but the sublimity of the writing and of the plot's tragedy emancipates it from the staidness of the genre. The upshot is that you shouldn't turn to this book if you want a fast paced thriller or "clever" writing. Read it if you want to cultivate your awareness of exceptional beauty; this book is for the cultured connoisseur, not needy readers.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: I had to write a review just to bring up a rating that was unfairly knocked down by a handful of obtuse reviewers. I wasn't an English lit major like some of these reviewers, but I have read upwards of 10,000 books in my life -with a concentration on literature- and have to say that the descriptive writing in "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" is the most beautiful and poetic I have yet encountered. It is not the most exciting, nor the most stunningly transformative(that honour goes to "Altas Shrugged") book, but the construction and execution is exquisite. The book is in fact slowly paced - so much so in the first couple of chapters that I was rebuffed the first time I started reading it. However, a little patience will grant you entry into the gorgeous spell Hardy invokes. Yes, it is a "victorian" novel, but the sublimity of the writing and of the plot's tragedy emancipates it from the staidness of the genre. The upshot is that you shouldn't turn to this book if you want a fast paced thriller or "clever" writing. Read it if you want to cultivate your awareness of exceptional beauty; this book is for the cultured connoisseur, not needy readers.
Rating:
Summary: My issue isn't with the work of fiction
Review: I love the story of Tess. Considering many of the classics I have ever read, I think Tess is one of the easier ones to understand. The work itself is a masterful story. However, I take issue with Penguin's version. The Notes are just awful- referencing back and forth from your place in the book to the back is a nightmare and many times isn't worth breaking your flow. Some of the Notes are helpful and even necessary to understand the sentence, but others are pointless and annoying. I recommend a different version, either without notes entirely or with more reasonable ones.
Rating: 
Summary: I was pleased
Review: I think part of the reason I kept so interested is because I had heard some horror stories about not being able to get through the book. So, in turn, I dilligently read and looked for the hard parts. I really didn't find anything. It kept my attention. I loved seeing the journey that Tess was on. I watched her character change drastically from beginning to end. It was fun to see that change. I will read more Thomas Hardy because of this experience.
Rating:
Summary: certainly one of the greatest novels ever written
Review: I was looking for another edition of TESS and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the "average customer rating" was only three stars. So I'm taking a moment to correct the balance. TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES must be as close to a perfect novel as anyone has written in English. It is a genuine tragedy with a girl/woman as tragic hero. It is about life on earth in a way that transcends mere sociology. It has the grandeur of Milton but concerns itself with the lives of mortal beings on earth, as much with sex as with dirt, blood, milk, dung, animal and vegetative energies. It concerns itself with only essential things the way the Bible does. It is almost a dark rendering of the Beatitudes. The story is built with such care and such genius that every incident, every paragraph, reverberates throughout the whole structure. Surely Hardy had an angel on his shoulder when he conceived and composed this work. Yet it was considered so immoral in its time that he had to bowdlerize his own creation in order to get it published, at first. Victorian readers were not prepared for the truth of the lives of ordinary women, or for a great many truths about themselves that Hardy presents. The use of British history as a hall of mirrors and the jawdropping detail of the landscape of "Wessex" make it the Great English Novel in the way we sometimes refer to MOBY DICK as the Great American Novel, though the works don't otherwise bear comparison. Melville's great white whale is a far punier creation. Hardy's style is like no one else's. It is not snappy, as Dickens can be. It is not fluid and elegant, like George Eliot's. It can feel labored and awkward and more archaic than either. It has no journalistic flavor, but is painfully pure and deliberate and dense, echoing Homer or the language of the Old Testament rather than anything we think of as "modern." Don't start with TESS but with FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, another very beautiful book, where Hardy is at his loosest and wittiest. Once you have the key to his style, then pick up a good edition of TESS with notes, e.g. Penguin, so you get the full richness of all the literary allusions. Hardy's lowly shepherds and farmhands move and breathe in a very ancient literary atmosphere. The effect is not pretentious but timeless. There is wisdom, poetry and majesty here. Tess stumbling through the dark and taking her last rest at Stonehenge will send chills up your spine like no other reading experience. I wonder if anyone can know why there are novels, why we care about them, or what they are capable of, without reading this one.
Rating:
Summary: Somber rustic majesty
Review: In a certain light, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" might be seen as a Cinderella story horribly disfigured by a tragic twist. When we first meet the heroine, Tess Durbeyfield, as a poor, hardworking farm girl who has to take care of her five younger siblings and fulfill the responsibilities abandoned by her inebriated father, she seems like a girl destined for greater things: a brilliant career in a more stimulating occupation, a blissful marriage to a wonderful man. But Hardy likes to illustrate fate's capacity for cruelty, and Tess is merely an innocent woman who is seemingly punished for her innocence. The name Durbeyfield is a vulgarization of d'Urberville, a family with a rich history descended from Norman knights and wealthy landowners, but various misfortunes have reduced the lineage to the commoners who presently inhabit the impoverished Durbeyfield household. (We learn later in the novel that the Durbeyfields are not the only local family to have suffered this appellative fall from grace.) Although the d'Urberville nobility is defunct, in the near past an enterprising businessman named Stoke sought to increase the prestige of his own family by appropriating a distinguished name from the county annals, and d'Urberville is the one he chose. Thus when Tess, to aid her family's finances after an unfortunate accident deprives them of their income, takes a job tending the fowl at the nearby d'Urberville estate, she mistakenly believes she is working for her relations. This ostensibly minor detail is really the basis of the irony which drives the novel. Had Mr. Stoke been honest and not assumed the name of the Durbeyfields' ancestors, Tess would not have been likely to meet the lecherous, skulking Alec d'Urberville, who rapes her after she rebuffs his attempted seduction and impregnates her with a baby that dies in infancy. Of course Hardy, evading the risk of censorship, is decorous enough to suggest in the subtlest manner possible that the rape happened rather than describe it explicitly, but Alec's immoral behavior is clearly implied. Mortified, heartbroken, Tess then goes to work as a milkmaid at a dairy farm where she and a young man named Angel Clare, the heartthrob of several of the farm girls, fall in love. Angel has defied his father, a vicar, by spurning a career in the clergy for agriculture and marriage with a middle class girl for Tess. He scoffs at his parents' snobbery, but after marrying Tess, he reveals a disturbing hypocrisy when she confesses to him the vicious treatment she had received from Alec and its consequences. Angel's reaction is far from the gentle sympathy one would expect from the magnanimous personality he projects; he is disgusted that she has been robbed of her purity and draws a strange parallel between her violation and the fall of her family's ancestral prestige. He rejects her, they separate, and once again she is mortified, heartbroken, and looking for a job. Tess is destined to rencounter both Angel and Alec before the end of the novel, and the changes to their characters not only advance the plot in unexpected ways but further emphasize Hardy's utilization of irony. The starkly contrasted images of the novel's penultimate scene at Stonehenge and the last scene, which takes place outside a prison where a black flag flies announcing an execution, raise the question of whether even Hardy knew when he started exactly how this somber story would end. The novel contains several recurring Hardy elements. Like most of his major work, it takes place in the southwestern part of England he calls Wessex, this time in the fertile Blackmoor Vale, and his evocation of the scenery sets the stage beautifully. Tess's co-workers at the dairy farm are a realistically cheerful lot and provide the continuum of humanity that such a story needs as a reprieve for its tragic mood. An interesting touch which shows that Hardy is not above recycling his own motifs is the similarity between the death of the Durbeyfield horse (a definite foreshadowing for Tess) and the tumbling sheep in "Far from the Madding Crowd," in that both incidents cause their respective protagonists to take distant jobs with fateful results. The incentive to read Hardy lies in his ability to put language at the service of one of the greatest functions of literature: to express the deepest desires and emotions of mankind.
Rating:
Summary: Compellingly sad
Review: Recently, my brother and I were discussing the "poverty penalty," the concept that the poor pay more for what they must buy because they have no bargaining power to invite competition, which drives down prices. This is obviously not a new phenomenon, because poor Tess Durbeyfield pays quite a poverty penalty through the course of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
This is the first novel of Hardy's I have read, but I chose it after reading "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" by Daniel Pool, a fabulous book about 18th century daily life.
Hardy's title, as quickly becomes evident, is tongue-in-cheek (he is author of my favorite title of a book, Jude the Obscure, which I haven't yet read) is ironic and mocking. Tess, the lovely and somewhat educated daughter of a cottager in Hardy's British district of Wessex, has the last name of Durbeyfield, but in the first pages of the book, her father, the ne'er-do-well, learns that he is descended from Norman aristocracy, the D'Urbervilles, and there aren't many of them left, except his clan, as the local reverend informs him. He instantly thinks himself very grand and takes it as an excuse to go carousing, which causes Tess and one of her many younger siblings to have to make an early morning journey with the horse for the family's means of making money. Sleeping on the journey, Tess wakes to find the horse impaled in a wreck and killed. Feeling guilty, she agrees to be sent as a poor relation to the Stoke-D'Urbervilles to seek assistance of some kind. (They are "new money" and have bought the name "D'Urberville" to build position for themselves, so they are actually no relation.)
There she encounters Alec D'Urberville, who pursues her vigorously, though she repeatedly eschews his attentions. She takes a job for his mother, watching her fowl, but one evening, separated from her friends in the village on the way home from a Saturday night out in the village, Alec stops accepting no for an answer.
Later she falls in mutual love with a gentleman (the son of a minister) who has rejected the pulpit himself in favor of learning the trade of dairy farming so that he may run his own farm some day. Angel Clare does fall in love with Tess, but at the same time, he doesn't seem to really know her, or want to... he thinks of her as a pure country maid, and has no idea about her past. When she tries to tell him, he shushes her, thinking he knows all about her. When she finally confides in him after the marriage, the results are disastrous and Tess is once again dealing with harsh reality.
I won't recount the rest of the story, but it's clear that the bourgeois (Alec) and the gentry (Angel) have a great deal to do with the pain and hardship of Tess's life; they inflict the poverty penalty on her. The idea of the fluidity of the aristocracy in the 18th century -- Tess is descended from them, but has no rights thereof, Alec has taken the name due to his money, and Angel has rejected the career of his familial role in favor of farming whilst entertaining a very aristocratic (and inaccurate) view of the "peasantry" -- is prominent in the novel, with Tess's inability to care for herself and fulfill her perceived familial goals without resorting to asking for help from those who don't have her bloodline at all. The town of Kingsbere, where Tess's ancestors are said to be buried, figures somewhat in the novel, and one cannot help but think that this symbolizes their use to her as being just as dead as they are.
There are some motifs of paganism in the book... Tess meets Angel for the first time at a May dance, a pagan rite, and she has another climactic plot moment at Stonehenge toward the end of the book. Angel himself seems to reject his father's Christian teachings, and the beliefs of Tess and her society are often deemed superstitious or quaint and encompassing of pagan belief systems. Tess often wishes to be free of her life of burdens, and who can blame her? She didn't cause the horse's death that plunged her into this chain of events, and yet she is punished and punished and punished.
Hardy's writing is beautiful and engaging. The book, though long, seems to quickly move from event to event, and the author's descriptions are enlightening and complete. I really liked this book and look forward to reading more by Hardy.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect for a Book Club
Review: Some great discussions come out of this book. Thomas Hardy has a very distinct style, and uses the environment essentially as another character, so it may be beneficial to at least have some familiarity with England before reading. No one can read this book without having strong opinions about the characters, especially the two main men. This is one of the standout pieces of literature of its time and is well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: mind-numbing, terrible writing
Review: The whole tragedy is in the fact that I was NOT forced to read this book but actually picked it up because I WANTED to read it (or so I thought at the time). I have read many books in my life, quite a lot of them classics, but I have to say that this book just about drove me bananas. I think there is a general misapprehension in thinking that a classic must be good. I dare not even think of how many times I probably came close to being committed to an asylum for acting suspiciously on the train while reading "Tess" (every two seconds I would sigh, roll my eyes, scoff or just plain throw my hands in the air from frustration). Many reviewers had rightly pointed out that the character of Tess is the shubbiest excuse of a woman in the whole Solar System. How can anybody, in any age, on any continent, be as spineless and masochistic as she is? This woman is more of a martyr that Joan of Arc, for crying out loud. The excuse that this book takes place in Victorian England doesn't quite cut it. I saw more strength and backbone in Hester of The Scarlet Letter (which story took place in a much more prudish and puritanical setting than England of 1800's). I think Thomas Hardy invented himself a woman who would act like his cocker spaniel; no matter how much he beat the crap out of that 'faithfull friend' the poor dog would always come crawling back and lick his boots, which is pretty much how Tess acts throughout the book. The whole scenario smacks a lot of a perverted male fantasy. Maybe Hardy had a nasty mother, who knows. I bet psychiatrists would have a field day with the author. I am disappointed and feel cheated of the time that I could have used to read something else; Dickens, for example. Or just Maeve Binchy, if I wanted female driven narrative. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" would have been a much better book if that idiot-of-a-husband and Tess herself would fall into that bloody river in the middle of the book (exactly as Tess wanted it) and have done with it. I know I would applaud such a great ending! In short: steer way clear of this one.
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