Tess of the d'Urbervilles [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Tess of the d'Urhervilles was first published in 1891. This bald - and at first sight somewhat uninteresting - fact conceals a wealth of significance in relation both to Hardy's own life and works and to die state of English fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. At die time of writing Tess of the d''Urbervilles, Hardy was in his early fifides, apparently at the height of his fictional powers, and, together with George Meredith, widely regarded as one of England's greatest living novelists. Yet after Tess he produced only one other major novel. Jude the Obscure, first published in 1895, was reviled by many reviewers, burnt by a bishop, and had the overall effect, as Hardy himself said in his 1912 postscript to the novel, of 'completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing'. From then until his death in 1928, Hardy devoted his literary career entirely to poetry. What caused this change? In order to understand Tess of the d'Urbervilles' distinctive place towards the end of Hardy's fictional oeuvre we need to go back almost to the begiiming of his career and examine the ways in which two distinct but repeated concerns develop through his novels to the point where they coalesce to sharpened effect in Tess. Hardy achieved his first major success as a writer with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). Abandoning the melodrama and sensationalism of his previous novel, Desperate Remedies, he turned for this work to a pastoral idyll set in the Dorset countryside of his birth which he was to develop through subsequent novels into the semi-fictionalised world of Wessex. His sub-title to the novel - 'A Rural Painting of the Dutch School' - draws attention to the loving though entirely unsentimental detail in which he depicted nature. His portrayal of rural life, with a richly robust cast of country characters, rapidly led to comparisons with Shakespeare's rustics. And indeed for a considerable time the English reading public felt that it could turn reliably to Hardy for a reassuring stroll in - as the