Rachael’s Reviews > Tess of the D’Urbervilles > Status Update

Tess’s heart wrenching baptism of her baby. The shadows, heat, candlelight, Tess’s frenzy of desperate faith. Oh how this scene breaks me.

And oh my, Hardy’s exquisite foreshadowing:
poor Prince pierced through the heart by the mail cart and Tess’s most reluctant, cruel and inevitable call to adventure’
*her utterly useless and yet not entirely unsympathetic parents

More fav scenes:
*Tess holding on for dear life in Alec’s gig and the image of the horse rising and falling before her, it’s hooves sparking flint as it gallops
*Tess breast feeding her baby in the harvest field surrounded by golden wheat...

*some of my favourite scenes: Tess fetching her parents from the ale house, and the boozers all packed in the land lady’s bedroom piled on furniture
*the cottagers dancing in the golden hay-pollen barn...

Hardy never once makes me feel like: ‘this is a man attempting to write a woman’, a feeling I often have when reading male authors attempting to write a woman. Tess always feel fully inhabited.

I have so many feelings retreading Tess, it does not fail to move, enchant and bruise me all over again.

*Alec still fills me with blistering rage, I want to scratch his eyes out and slap his smarmy mouth
*Hardy’s imagery is so potently cinematic there is so much about his writing I find intensely modern

I have not read Tess in nearly 20 years. I was scrolling Goodreads the other night and saw someone had been rating Hardy books and I was gripped by a mighty need. I immediately downloaded it to my phone and started reading and oh my heart, how I love this book, though I know it will break me again because that's what Hardy does. He puts your heart in a vice and page by page the screws tighten...