oxford world’ s classics TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on 2 June 1840; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publica- tion of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (1871), he determined to make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an architect had led to his meeting, at St Juliot in Cornwall, Emma Gifford, who became his first wife in 1874. In the 1860s Hardy had written a substantial amount of unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his creative effort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure, the last written of his novels, came out in 1895, closing a sequence of fiction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in his collected verse (almost all published after 1898) possess great individuality and power. In 1910 Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in 1912 Emma died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas Hardy died in January 1928; the work he left behind––the novels, the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynasts––forms one of the supreme achievements in English imaginative literature. Simon Gatrell is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the General Editor of Hardy in the Oxford World’s Classics series and joint editor of a critical edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Clarendon Press, Oxford). Juliet Grindle was lecturer in English at the University of Cardiff, and joint editor of the Clarendon edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Penny Boumelha holds the Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, where she is also Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Her work on Hardy includes Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (1982), essays on many of the major novels, and the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Woodlanders. Nancy Barrineau teaches English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles–– from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS THOMAS HARDY Tess of the d’Urbervilles Edited by JULIET GRINDLE and SIMON GATRELL With a new Introduction by PENNY BOUMELHA Notes by NANCY BARRINEAU 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Text © Oxford University Press 1983 Introduction and Select Bibliography © Penny Boumelha 2005 Note on the Text © Simon Gatrell 1988 Explanatory Notes © Nancy Barrineau 1988 Chronology © Patricia Ingham 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1988 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 New edition 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–284069–X 1 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc., Suffolk CONTENTS General Editor’s Preface vii Map of Hardy’s Wessex viii Map of Locations in Tess of the d’Urbervilles x Introduction xiii Note on the Text xxviii Select Bibliography xxxiv A Chronology of Thomas Hardy xxxix TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES 1 Explanatory Notes 421 This page intentionally left blank GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE The first concern in the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Hardy’s works has been with the texts. Individual editors have compared every version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised, and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation, and styling in each of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to exclude much that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. In some cases this is the first time that the novel has appeared in a critical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possible Hardy’s manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what his com- positors thought he should have written. Some account of the editors’ discoveries will be found in the Note on the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisions their work has revealed are included as an element of the Explana- tory Notes. In some cases a Clarendon Press edition of the novel provides a wealth of further material for the reader interested in the way Hardy’s writing developed from manuscript to final collected edition. I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing the maps that accompany each volume. Simon Gatrell This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue. I Tess of the d’Urbervilles has held in the imagination of generations of readers a deserved place in the great series of novels of sexual tragedy that nineteenth-century Europe produced. Like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the novel takes its title from its heroine, held in intense single focus, and its plot structure from her sexual and marital history. That plot, almost elemental in its simplicity, draws resonance from its recapitulation of familiar elements of folk tale and myth. There are no sub-plots to parallel or contrast with Tess’s story, and virtually no plot elements that do not bear directly upon her fate. There can seem something transcendent of history about the vividness of such figures and their narrative environments, but in fact a reading of Tess is enriched by an under- standing of how intimately it is related to the moral debates and fictional developments of its time of writing. It is important that the novel is not set in the unspecific ‘once upon a time’ of fairy tale, but embeds its folk elements squarely in the context of recognizable English society of the nineteenth century. The changing conditions of rural labour, factional disputes within the Church of England, the class structure of society, the National School movement, all take their place beside the mythological, biblical, and folk allusions to ensure that the novel bestows a challenging contemporaneity upon its tale of the maiden seduced and abandoned. Added to that realism is the strain of moral––even polemical––commentary which repeat- edly insists to the reader that Tess has done nothing wrong. Given these elements of the novel, it is perhaps not surprising that it has from the outset polarized its readers into supporters and detractors. By the 1890s, Hardy was a well-established and successful novelist whose preoccupation with female characters and implicitly sexual themes had already been widely noted, often with regret, as it appeared to some reviewers of the time to be slightly vulgar; Richard Le Gallienne, for example, comments that ‘There is one fault in xiv Introduction Mr Hardy’s work that still jars . but which he can hardly be expected to eradicate, as it is temperamental––a certain slight coarseness of touch in his lovemaking . [H]is women and men alike are always somewhat too obviously animal.’1 But in the latter part of the nineteenth century, matters relating to gender and sexual- ity moved to the centre of public debate, with such developments as the introduction of civil divorce and the subsequent press interest in divorce cases, the rise of what is now called first-wave feminism, the campaigns against the double standard and child prostitution and the related raising of the age of consent, the trial of Oscar Wilde, and the emergence of the eugenics movement.