Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: a sourcebook

1. Contexts

Contextual overview

Chronology

Contemporary documents

Thomas Hardy, 'Candour in English fiction' (1890)

Thomas Hardy, excerpt from serialized version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

Thomas Hardy, selection of poems

Tess's lament

We field-women

well-beloved

ruined maid

At a hasty wedding

hurried meeting

turnip-hoer

Winter in Durnover Field

Doom and she

lacking sense

labourer's daily life / Richard Jeffries

Field-faring women / Richard Jeffries

virgin forest [of Brazil] / Anonymous

Stonehenge / James Fergusson

2. Interpretations

Critical history

Early critical reception

Illustrated London News (1892) / Clementina Black

Athenaeum (1892) / Anonymous

Spectator (1892) / R. H. Hutton

Blackwood's magazine (1892) / Margaret Oliphant

Culture and anarchy, Quarterly Review (1892) / Mowbray Morris

Modern criticism

Thomas Hardy (1967) / Irving Howe

Thomas Hardy : his career as a novelist (1971) / Michael Millgate

novels of Thomas Hardy : illusion and reality (1974) / Penelope Vigar

Tess's purity, Essays in criticism (1976) / Mary Jacobus

essay on Hardy (1978) / John Bayley

Ways of looking at Tess, Studies in philology (1982) / Janet Freeman

Thomas Hardy and the proper study of mankind (1993) / Simon Gatrell

Moments of vision : postmodernising Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1994) / Peter Widdowson

English novel : form and function (1953) / Dorothy Van Ghent

Colour and movement in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1968) / Tony Tanner

Hardy the writer (1990) / F. B. Pinion

Thomas Hardy and women : sexual ideology and narrative form (1982) / Penny Boumelha

Tess and Alec : rape or seduction? (1986) / Kristin Brady

"You did not come" : absence, death and eroticism in Tess (1990) / James Kincaid

rape of Tess : Hardy, English law, and the case for sexual assault (1997) / William A. Davis, Jr.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel" : redundant women in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2000) / Lisa Sternlieb

language of fiction : essays in criticism and verbal analysis of the English novel (1967) / David Lodge

Thomas Hardy and rural England (1972) / Merryn Williams

great web : the form of Hardy's major fiction (1974) / Ian Gregor

"The perfection of species" and Hardy's Tess (1977) / Bruce Johnson

Dreaming holmberry-lipped Tess : aboriginal reverie and spectatorial desire in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2000) / Adam Gussow

work in performance

3. Key passages

Key passages

From Phase the first : the maiden

From Phase the second : maiden no more

From Phase the third : the rally

From Phase the fourth : the consequence

From Phase the fifth : the woman pays

From Phase the sixth : the convert

From Phase the seventh : fulfilment

4. Further reading.