SEPTEMBER, 2026

Book at a glance

• Author: Thomas Hardy

• First published: 1891

• Genre: Victorian Realism

• My copy: Penguin Classics

I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles the way most of us first read anything at school: because it was on the syllabus, because an exam was waiting at the end of it, and because a teacher had decided, on our behalf, that this particular Victorian novel about a dairymaid's ruin was the one we needed. I remember being fifteen, or thereabouts, and finding the book slow in the places a fifteen-year-old finds everything slow, the long descriptions of the Wessex countryside, the dialect passages I skimmed rather than read, the sense that Thomas Hardy was in no hurry to get anywhere. What I did not skim, what stayed with me even as the syllabus itself has long since dissolved into a blur of dates and set essays, was the injustice at the centre of it. I did not have the vocabulary at fifteen to call it that. I only knew that something in the book felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with plot, and everything to do with how the world had been arranged to receive one particular kind of person.

For anyone who has not read it, or who read it decades ago and remembers only the broad shape: Tess Durbeyfield is a poor countrywoman whose family, informed that they descend from Norman nobility, send her to claim kinship with a wealthy family who share their name. There she is pursued, and eventually raped, by Alec d'Urberville, a man with no real claim to the name at all, merely money enough to have purchased it. She bears his child, who dies in infancy. Years later she falls in love with Angel Clare, an idealistic young man who marries her, and who abandons her on their wedding night the moment she confesses what happened with Alec, and does so precisely because he believes every word of it. Angel, who has his own past indiscretion to confess and does so with far less anguish than he demands of her, cannot forgive in Tess what he has already forgiven in himself. The novel ends, as anyone who has read it will remember, at Stonehenge, with Tess arrested for a murder the book has spent four hundred pages making entirely understandable, and Hardy's own bitter closing line about the "President of the Immortals" having ended his sport with her.

What strikes me now, reading it again as an adult who has spent a career telling stories, is how precisely Hardy identifies the actual crime of the book, and how carefully he distinguishes it from the crime everyone in the story believes has been committed. Tess is punished, repeatedly, by nearly every institution and person she encounters, for something that was done to her rather than something she did. Her family exploits her. Alec violates her. Angel condemns her for the violation rather than the violator. The law finally executes her for the one act in the entire novel in which she has genuine agency, and even that act is presented as the inevitable consequence of everything that preceded it. Hardy does not ask his reader to decide whether Tess is guilty. He asks his reader to notice that guilt, in the world the novel describes, has almost nothing to do with what a person actually does, and almost everything to do with what a person is permitted to have happen to them without being blamed for it.

I did not have language for this at fifteen. I have spent a good part of my working life since then, across novels, and across the several films I have made, drawn back to some version of the same question, usually without setting out to be. A story about a dancer whose talent is inseparable from a body that other people insist on having opinions about. A story about a woman whose desire is treated, by everyone around her, as a problem to be managed rather than a fact to be respected. I do not think this is coincidence, and I do not think it is unique to me. Hardy identified something that has never stopped being true, which is that societies are extremely good at deciding, after the fact, that a woman's suffering was somehow her doing, and extraordinarily reluctant to extend the same forensic curiosity to the men involved. Angel Clare is not a villain in the way Alec is a villain. He is something worse, in a way, because he is entirely sincere. He genuinely believes his own logic. That is what makes him unbearable to read, and it is also, I suspect, why Hardy gave him more page space than he gave Alec. Villainy is easy to write and easier to dismiss. Sincere, well-intentioned cruelty is the harder and more useful subject, because it does not go away once the villain is punished. It simply puts on a clean collar and marries someone else.

I do not think Tess is a perfect novel. Hardy's own narration occasionally editorialises in ways that feel heavy-handed now, and his fondness for coincidence, for letters that arrive under the wrong door at the wrong moment, asks a fair amount of patience from a modern reader. But the central architecture of the book, the distance between what a person has done and what a person is blamed for, has not dated at all. If anything it has become easier to see clearly, because I no longer need Hardy to explain it to me in the abstract. I have watched it operate, in smaller and larger ways, in rooms I have actually stood in.

What I return to, more than the plot or even the injustice, is the dairy at Talbothays, the one genuinely happy stretch of the novel, where Tess and Angel fall in love amid the actual, unglamorous work of milking cows and making butter, and where Hardy, usually so intent on punishing his heroine, allows her a summer of something close to peace before he takes it away again. The tragedy itself is well signposted from the title page onward, so it is the part that has stayed with me the least. What has stayed with me is the fact that Hardy bothered to let her have the summer at all. He did not need to. A crueller novel, or a lazier one, would have rushed her straight from ruin to ruin. Hardy gives her Talbothays anyway, weeks of real, undeserved happiness, before the machinery of the plot closes back around her, and I have come to think that this is the more honest and the more devastating choice, because it insists that the joy was real even though it did not last, and that a life is not simply the sum of how it ends.