Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Autumn 2025

In 1856 the sixteen year old Thomas Hardy witnessed the execution of Martha Browne. She had murdered her husband ‘on account of [his] unfaithfulness’ Seventy years later the memory of what he saw that day was still clear in his memory, as he recalled in a letter written in 1926.

That judicial murder and Hardy’s complex reactions to it were the seeds of what, 36 years later, became “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”. As he describes Tess’s development and explores the motives for her actions, Hardy employs accident and coincidence as his assistants.

His skills as a novelist in structuring plot and evolving character are complemented by a poet’s eye for the detail of a shifting landscape. The product of this is one of the finest of the late-Victorian novels and one of Hardy’s own most-favoured works.

As well as working our way through the seven parts of the novel in some detail, we will try to assess three of the screen adaptations of the book. Just as Hardy challenged accepted views of women in the novel, so the differing interpretations of these may tell us something about changing attitudes in more recent times.

We will start the week beginning October 13th, and then meet every week for seven weeks. Each week there will be a brief introductory video to the relevant section of the novel.