Book description
HarperCollins is pround to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.
'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see
what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a
nothing I am!'
Challenging the hypocrisy and social conventions of the rural Victorian
world, Tess of the D'Urbervilles follows the story of Tess Durbeyfield
as she attempts to escape the poverty of her background, seeking wealth
by claiming connection with the aristocratic D'Urberville family. It is
through Tess's relationships with two very different men that Hardy
tells the story of his tragic heroine, and exposes the double standards
of the world that she inhabits with searing pathos and heart-rending
sentiment. Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He
enrolled as a student in King's College, London, but never felt at ease
there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with
society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in
Hardy's novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of
Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a
significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.
