Tess

by Emma Tennant

In Tess, Tennant offers us an interpretation of Hardy's novel that places the real women in the author's life at its centre. Tess is based on Hardy's real-life obsession with a milkmaid named Augusta Way, who became the model for his tragic heroine Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Augusta's daughter, Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess in Hardy's stage adaptation of the book. Set in the late Sixties, the spirit of the doomed Tess lives on in a pair of sisters - plain-faced Liza Lu and another dark, beautiful Tess.

Genres: British Literature, Fiction

259 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I keep being tempted to read spin-offs or "re-imaginings" of classic works. Some are interesting, but this updating of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles just seems a bit thin and pointless.

[LJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few interesting themes, but didn't work for me. The narrative comprises a couple of barely-related threads, signposts its own twists, chucks in a couple of incongruous shocks and for all its self-referential cleverness ultimately delivers a pale imitation of Hardy's original.