Tess

by Emma Tennant

This is the story of Thomas Hardy's Tess, and of the woman who became the incarnation of his fictional creation, the actress Gertrude Bugler, who was the daughter of the model for the original Tess and the recipient of Hardy's amorous advances. It is the story of women seen and imagined by men.

Genres: British Literature, Fiction

Hardcover

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.