Tess of the D'urbervilles by Thomas Hardy unabridged audiobook
unabridged and narrated by Anna Bentinck
Tess of the DUrbervilles tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, forced by her familys poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy DUrbervilles. Violated by the son, Alec, her hopes of rebuilding her life with the gentle and bookish Angel Clare founder when he learns of her past. Set among the lush pastures and bleak uplands of Hardys imagined Wessex, and filled with unforgettable images of tenderness and tragedy, the story examines conventional morality through Tess herself, one of the best-loved characters in English literature.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
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.
