Tess D´Urberville (1891)

I am still sad thinking about the pivotal scene. A pox on double standards! How heartbreakingly did I feel Tess's trust and betrayal! It is for the emotional pitch that Hardy captured and I reached that I gave this book its four stars.

Tess's work ethic and her ability to do backbreaking and monotonous labor is left without much comment but is one of the things that I was left to think about after I finished- what does it mean? Is it penance? Is it a mark of her moral superiority? Heterodoxy? Religion? Or is her stark independence, won through mud and dust, a rallying cry to women everywhere: one must not be beholden to a male provider? Food for thought, for sure.

Travel also plays a significant role in this novel. Tess is often alone, traveling through the dark countryside. Another gesture to finding independence for yourself, especially as a young woman? More food for thought.

Hardy uses a lot of crazy vocabulary words to describe landscapes. Why? What was he thinking? Anyway, I broke out the dictionary a bunch of times and learned insane words for describing arable land. ( )

Great book wonderfully written. ( )

Thomas Hardy is some kind of demented genius. He depicts the hypocrisy of gender stereotypes in Victorian society so vividly that you feel the acutest dread and misery as you read. It's about as pleasant as an annual pap smear. Or a root canal. I do not ever feel the need to read this book again. Tess is a pathetic, sweet, naive little flower, and the men are horrible. This was a miserable reading experience, and it does.not.let.up. ( )

In stead of reading the paper edition, I chose to listen to the audio version of this book.

Well, what can I say. In a way it was a great portrait of several characters. Modern people, stubborn, old fashioned ones. It was also an account of the life of Tess, who started out as a naive young girl that was terribly harmed and took a big blow from life.

I didn't particularly like the writing style (the secrecy, not overtly writing about a subject or describing what is happening. It is part of the time frame though, so I've put up with it. And again a more or less helpless woman (who can earn her own bread & butter), but is bound to a man/men by the circumstances, unable to get out because of conventions. Even though I realized that while reading, it still made me livid... ( )

This book was so tragic it was painful. But I am left wondering...why? Maybe this is some kind of commentary on the world and the people of Hardy's time, maybe this tells us something about where we all were culturally or socially, but I couldn't see it for all of the gut-wrenching heartbreak. Usually tragedy goes hand-in-hand with some sense of "rightness" or meaning but this hurt so bad that I rushed my way through the ending just so the pain would stop. Hardy's writing is beautiful, and timeless in a way that even I found it was accessible in the world of 2019 Internetspeak. Just why did it have to hurt so much? ( )