(Arthur with his usual cutting edge commentary on current events).
Believe it or not, I’m actually fairly well read and fairly knowledgeable about musical. For some reason, my natural instinct on THIS place is to talk about the gaps in my knowledge, the big things I haven’t read and haven’t listened to.
Well, here’s another one. Only 130 years or so behind the curve, I’ve just read Tess for the first time. Admittedly there are some long, boring bits where you just want to strangle the girl for not having the gumption to stand up for herself, but as on overall experience it has blown me away.
The evocation of a rural landscape, and the dying of a farming culture, is fantastic. Plot-wise, I had no idea of the twists and turns that awaited our heroine, and the story was immensely moving, especially in the forbidding, poignant, spectral closing chapters. I love how the title turns out to be ironic, which I wasn’t expecting.
Although I realise it’s 130 years old and so it’s silly to talk of plot spoilers, I still don’t want to say any more in case there are others like me who genuinely don’t know the story.
Not much more I can add to be honest. Just the thrill of finishing a good book and wanting to rave about it. Any of you clever chaps got any insights or observations about Tess or about Thomas Hardy in general? There’s a bit of a debate about feminism and misogyny in Tess I know, so any views on that? Is it dated and sensationalist, or ahead of its time?
It’s ages since I read Tess or indeed any Hardy, but he was in my Top 5 novelists studied at A- and degree level. You’re absolutely right about the emotional impact of her fate, but I wouldn’t ascribe any blame on her for her extreme passivity; it’s a reflection of her social standing as an impoverished, relatively uneducated young woman in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, and a manifestation of Hardy’s concept of an Immanent Will, an indifferent force that pre-determines our fate regardless of how we resist and try to change it.
The misogyny aspects are again a reflection of the times but are presented in contrasting ways which also incorporate class and religious privilege.
[SPOILERS!]
For me, Alec’s mistreatment of Tess is easier to understand (if not exactly tolerate) than the monstrous way in which the supposedly enlightened and broadminded, but ultimately priggish Angel destroys her spiritual innocence and trust.
If you think Tess’s experiences are bleak, have a go with Jude The Obscure…
Blimey that’s a book. I was in Oxford recently, down by Folly Bridge and it brought the end of Jude to mind. Brrr.
Also way behind the times as I only read it myself for the first time about six months ago. Equally impressed (despite the boring bits) and will shortly attempt another of Hardy’s books. Recommendations?
On a related theme, currently listening to Jim Capaldi for the first time as I bought his ‘Whale Meat Again’ album today. Loving it and unsure of how I’ve not heard it till now.
Pshaw! Back in the day, Hardy’s books were the ones you read (in my case, only temporarily) in order to try to pull that gorgeous girl you knew who was doing English. Either you got lucky and maybe read the rest of it in bed post-coitally, or you didn’t, in which case you lobbed the tome and moved on to something more robust and stirring. Another J. T. Edson title, perhaps.
Ackshully, I confess I’ve tried many times to wade in, open-minded, to a Hardy or two. I’m very familiar with the Dorset of his Wessex, and I’ve even made the pilgrimage to Higher Bockhampton, but sadly, on attempting to navigate his works (Casterbridge, Tess and Madding Crowd I think I’ve opened and started) I’ve never been able to maintain an interest in the yarn long enough to get hooked. Perhaps I should try again?
They had a few JT Edson on Kindle a couple of years ago for 29p each so I invested. Excellent! I read them all BITD. He was English you know, ol’ JT.
..and never set foot in the USA, I seem to recall.
At times in his early career he worked as a postman and as a chip shop proprietor to supplement his income.
From Wikipedia:
«Edson openly claimed, though rather tongue-in-cheek, that he wrote for the money. In an article for Time magazine in February 1999, he declared that unlike such authors as Louis L’Amour, he had “no desire to have lived in the Wild West, and I’ve never even been on a horse. I’ve seen those things and they look highly dangerous at both ends and bloody uncomfortable in the middle.”»
My late dad was a big fan of J.T. Edson’s westerns. I read quite a few in my long-ago youth. They were most entertaining.
I liked the Mayor of Casterbridge.
I also liked Dennis Potter’s fine TV adaptation of the book which the BBC screened in 1978.
Alan Bates was a tip-top Michael Henchard.
My father was a cretin but, after that 1978 TV adaptation, he bought the book (the only one I ever saw him read). I don’t think he finished it. We did name our next dog Tess, though.
I recently asked an eternally youthful neighbour (a secondary school English teacher) if she had an aging portrait in her attic. “You what?” she replied. I had to explain The Picture of Dorian Gray to her. She had heard of Oscar Wilde, at least.
At least your dad got to go to the hop with the Ramones.
I’ve always admired Hardy both as a novelist and as a poet. He was fairly prolific at both, and although much of his lesser poetry is turgid and pedestrian, at his best he is beyond compare. Hardy got a lot of stick from Victorian moralists as a result of writing Tess, which ultimately led to him giving up novel writing for poetry. His 6 major novels are usually seen as Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Woodlanders. Any of them are worth reading, although Tess, Jude and TMoC are all personal favourites. There’s a lovely passage in Far From the Madding Crowd that I’ve always admired. No apologies for quoting it below.
‘Time went on, and the moon vanished not to reappear. It was the farewell of the ambassador previous to war. The night had a haggard look, like a sick thing; and there came finally an utter expiration of air from the whole heaven in the form of a slow breeze, which might have been likened to a death. And now nothing was heard in the yard but the dull thuds of the beetle which drove in the spars, and the rustle of thatch in the intervals’.
Critics of Hardy find him gloomy and pessimistic, and his novels’ plots structured around unlikely coincidences. Me, I love him.
The Return of the Native, it can be shared, has an exciting bit. I’m a Hardy fan and have read them all but generally they don’t have exciting bits.
I did Tess for A level and quite enjoyed it though this was tempered by having to study it. I read it again a few years later and loved it. Ditto the views on Angel Claire BTW. What a twat.
What’s the exciting bit? I’ve not read it. Is it when the native comes back?
“Morning native, haven’t seen you for a while”
“I’ve been away. Anything happen while I was gone?”
“Not much, we just sat around being miserable”
I have read Tess many years ago and found it a little on the heavy going side but okay in a nothing special kind of way.
Personally I think Daphne Du Maurier is much much better. Both Jamaica Inn and Rebecca are excellent but try the less heralded The House on the Strand which is superb.
Thumbs up icon here.
Oh – I’m reading House on the Strand at the moment, having recently fallen for du Maurier’s short stories. It’s very interesting and surprising, although I find that her descriptions of the landscape are too many and too dull, so I tend to skim over them…very few authors can describe a view in a way that makes me see it in my mind. The shorter the better IMO, otherwise it’s just seems like padding.
Never picked up anything by Hardy, don’t think I ever will. I enjoyed reading lots of classics as a child, but as I’ve aged into the classic category myself, I find myself more drawn to the contemporary stuff. Classics are always a “OK, deep breath, steel yourself!” type of experience for me now. I like the idea of them more than I like actually reading them, most of the time.
There’s that problem that as a book becomes a classic, it can be seen as something you would only read out of a sense of duty. Sometimes, it is unfair, but with others it is that culture has changed so much, that they seem marooned in their original period.
When I was at school in the seventies, we had to read Sons and Lovers as part of the O level (between 14 and 16). No-one seemed to like it, including our teacher. He went off ill toward the end of the course, and the head of English took over. His first question was which other books by Lawrence we had read, and he was genuinely astonished that no-one had read any. Didn’t we find his writing bold and exciting (he probably meant about sex, but he didn’t say that)? For me anyway, it was about as interesting as reading about wheat production in Saskatchewan. It seemed odd at the time that such an idiosyncratic writer could be seen as someone who would appeal to the young.
But that teacher was probably born around 1914 and would have grown up with Lawrence being seen as one of the most challenging writers of a new generation – almost a shared secret with your contemporaries. Now, forty years later, he was just something you plodded through to pass an exam. Probably unfair, and I’m all in favour of English literature being part of the curriculum. But tastes change, and the reasons a book gets on a syllabus, and then drops off, must be partly subjective. Like pop music, to some extent, you had to be there at the time for it to make its biggest impact.
We did Odour Of Chrysanthemums at school, a Lawrence short story. I thought it was brilliant and have never forgotten it. A lot depends on the teaching and the books you get. It can mean life changing moments of revelation if you are lucky.
Minor novelist, absolutely incredible poet.
Who’s in the room…..Who?
“Minor novelist, absolutely incredible poet.”
See also Philip Larkin.
‘Minor novelist’?! Only one of the greatest in the language. Recently re-read Return of the Native and thoguht it was as powerful as I did when I read it as a student. Must get round to Tess again.
As for Larkin? Hopeless novelist, very good poet.
You’re being very kind to Larkin’s novels there.
He’s easy to admire and hard to love, Hardy – though I know lots of people disagree with me. I think he punches hardest when you’re a teenager: all that gloom, all that nobody-understands-me angst, all that having a pig’s dick chucked at your head as you walk down the lane – the universal concerns.
I know there’s a place for the deep, deep pessimism he brings to the table but I find it bloody hard work. My basic position is that pessimism is usually cowardice masquerading as depth, and that’s how he often feels to me. I like light and shade, and he’s one long deeply, deeply black mood, with no detectable sense of humour at all.
Saying that, novelist-poets who are equally well-regarded for both are thin on the ground (I can only really think of DH Lawrence), so you’ve got to hand it to him. I like his poetry more than the novels, on the whole, but it’s rhythmically and technically quite staid. When you compare what other Victorians had done with form and language – Tennyson, Rossetti, Elizabeth BB, most especially Hopkins (though you can’t blame Hardy or anyone contemporary for not having read Hopkins), he can seem a bit sing-song. Very prone to the common metre – you can sing half his poems to the tune of O Little Town of Bethlehem: try it with The Darkling Thrush – and still glum as fuck, though with more glimmers of hope than the novels, to my eyes.
If I had to choose a novel of his, though, Tess would be the one.
Yes this novel’s a bit heavy handed, and unsubtle. Lays it on with a trowel you could say.
Though less so than Jude the Obscure. No wonder he abandoned fiction after that one. Little Father Time was so bleak that the unrelenting misery provided comic relief all by itself.
Like many here I haven’t read Hardy for years, and if I think about him now it’s in relation to his poetry as an influence on Larkin. Hardy and gender was a big theme in one year of my degree course (I think one of my tutors was doing her phd thesis centred in it). I remember being thoroughly enlightened by Elaine Showalter’s celebrated essay The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge.
These days Professor Showalter and I occasionally exchange online pleasantries about Wordle on Twitter. That isn’t a turn of events I could have foreseen, nor a clause I would have understood in the mid 80s come to that.
His war poetry is rather good. I didn’t know he was a war poet until I invested in a volume of his poetry.
Hurrah! Let’s here it for the 19th Century novel….
A critic once said of Hardy: ‘What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?’
At the very least his novels are superb examples of the novel form in terms of exploring individual characters’ relationship to the (changing) society they find themselves in. And in doing so raise the questions that great art does about human behaviour in the face of (in Tess’s case) appalling male behaviour and snobbery, not to mention the general indifference of the world towards a spirited girl!
Hardy wrote well about women, despite treating his first wife unlovingly – although his regret at his relationship with her fuelled arguably the greatest love poems in the language, as others have noted.
I’d recommend Claire Tomalin’s biography, and ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ as a next read. Another novel with a heroine navigating her way into and through a world dominated by class, misogyny and all the usual ingredients.
Don’t forget the fabulous Monty Python sketch: ‘Here comes Hardy…..’
“A Sat. A…Sat. Doesn’t make sense.” 😏
Return of the Native was the first Hardy I read, though I was itching to read the big three (Jude, Mayor, Tess) from reputation alone. The heat of Egdon Heath seems very relevant today.
Hardy made me a goth even more than the Sisters, Joy Division and Bauhaus. The yearning of those characters to make something of their lives, even as external forces and personal flaws pushed them down made them bittersweet reads. I still want those main characters to make it out of the desperate situations they found themselves in.
Jude the Obscure, Hey Jude (no 1 when I was born) and St Jude all had resonances for me – I wrote an essay on the Hardy novel for the Oxford entrance exam. Of course I didn’t get in. It wouldn’t have been right if I had…
Return Of The Native was one of O level Eng Lit texts, which somehow put me off him, tho’ I later dutifully ploughed through the rest. (Bagged a 1 mind, my best grade.) Enjoyed all those BBC sunday night versions over the years. I even liked the Polanski Tess for reasons literary and less, some due to Ms Kinski.
Oh yes – the Talbothays Dairy scenes come to mind in particular.
Great book. Read it on the train between Athens and Belgrade in 1983. Had seen the Polanski film first though
I live directly opposite the Kings Arms, where Hardy rented a room to write much of the Mayor of Casterbridge, and which itself features in a key scene in the book. Two doors down is the Corn Exchange, which features in Far from the Madding Crowd, and where the first performance of Tess took place in the 1920s. Next door to me is one of the two churches that cause dire confusion in FFTMC. Over the rooftops I can see the prison where Martha Brown was hanged , which Hardy watched and whose real life story is said to have influenced Tess.
For all that, and whilst its quite fun to live right next to places that people travel the world to visit, I agree with Hardy himself and find his poems far better. Earlier work like Dance at the Phoenix and the Ruined Maid far more succinctly convey some of his key themes and ideas, with some wit and arguably even a better sense of time and place. Later work written in the wake of the death of his first wife is more powerful.
For all that, if you want an evocation of the rural world and ( North) Dorset before the railways, William Barnes is your man, ( albeit there is absolutely no prospect of Barnes ever making it onto the GCSE syllabus).
As a Dorset exile, I try to read a bit of William Barnes on occasion just to remind me of my teenage years in Puddletown. I see PJ Harvey is also channeling her inner Barnes in her new poetry book.
I only came from 20 miles away in Poole but I really struggled to understand at times, and boy did the locals have fun at my expense. I remember on my first day, a guy asked me to join him on the other side of the car ( I was an apprentice mechanic). It took me a while to decipher “Kum rownd yur wur oi b’to”
Yes, I gather PJ made extensive use of Barnes Glossary of Dorset Dialect. I sometimes wonder how much the dlalect must have varied within the county even then – it’s from 1867 and at least in part Barnes is harking back to when he was a child during the first decade of the 1800s. I suspect that some words and accents in the Blackmore Vale were potentially quite different from the likes of Weymouth and Poole, or even Bridport and Lyme Regis
The measure of whether anything will get onto the GCSE or A Level syllabus is: is there a relatively recent film of it, that we can screen in class in lieu of the students actually reading the book…?
Ah me and the C19 novel. Am only, after 30 years of refusal, starting to make inroads. George Eliot absolutely, need to read Middlemarch again. Wilkie Collins is fabulous entertainment. I’ve also enjoyed Jane Eyre, but found Wuthering Heights a real struggle. I can just about get the more concise Dickens – so Hard Times particularly. But Hardy. This thread has perhaps prompted me to give him one more go. I see it’s nearly 600 pages. Great.
I had to persevere a bit with Wilkie Collins but both The Woman In White and The Moonstone were worth it in the end.
I always thought it was a Sherlock Holmes story.
“The dame’s afoot, Watson!”
“Who’s a good dog, Tess? Yes, you are! From a line of pedigree hounds. Let’s go and meet some of them.”
“That Angel Baskerville seemed a friendly fellow. You were wagging your tail for him aplenty! But for some reason you’ve ended up in hock to this Alec Stapleton. He’ll do you no good, Tess.”
How funny. I’ve never noticed that rhyming similarity before – I love this kind of thing (is it a rhyme? Or is there a more specific word for it? Calling all English teachers…)
Tess of the Baskervilles.
Hound of the D’Urbervilles.
It’s called a “lookey-likey”.
That’s the term I was looking for, that’s it exactly.
Ville/Ville is a rhyme all right. Ville and, for example, ‘file’ is assonance (‘Getting the rhyme wrong’ to quote Educating Rita).
Big in Japan – that was the sound of the Alphavilles.
I’ll get me deerstalker…
A book that literally changed my life.
School wanted me to study English at A level. Tess was on the syllabus so I gave it a go.
A page long description of a tree (or so I remember) put me off so I did Physics instead.
Much of my life flowed from that decision.
And no, I never have gone back to it
An unemployable English graduate writes: Boy, did you make the right decision
Physics/Eng lit, much of a muchness, all learning stuff you don’t understand off by heart……
Does Thomas Hardy learn you how to wire a plug?
Of course not, the inconsiderate bastid