Tess of the d'Urbervilles - The Original Classic Edition

This is certainly one of the greatest novels ever written. <p> TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES 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. <p> 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. <p> The use of British history as a hall of mirrors and the jawdropping detail of the landscape of Wessex make it the Great English Novel in the way we sometimes refer to MOBY DICK as the Great American Novel, though the works dont otherwise bear comparison. Melvilles great white whale is a far punier creation. <p> Hardys style is like no one elses. It is not snappy, as Dickens can be. It is not fluid and elegant, like George Eliots. It can feel labored and awkward and more archaic than either. It has no journalistic flavor, but is painfully pure and deliberate and dense, echoing Homer or the language of the Old Testament rather than anything we think of as modern. Dont start with TESS but with FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, another very beautiful book, where Hardy is at his loosest and wittiest. Once you have the key to his style, then pick up a good edition of TESS with notes, e.g. Penguin, so you get the full richness of all the literary allusions. Hardys lowly shepherds and farmhands move and breathe in a very ancient literary atmosphere. The effect is not pretentious but timeless. <p> There is wisdom, poetry and majesty here. Tess stumbling through the dark and taking her last rest at Stonehenge will send chills up your spine like no other reading experience. This book makes you wonder if anyone can know why there are novels, why we care about them, or what they are capable of, without reading this one.