Thi story begins in Marlot how Mrs Durbeyfield was talking with a parson a and he had told him he is a descendant of the acient and noble family d´Ubbervilles.While his girl Tess was dancing in her white dress at May-day with other girls and met one man who made at her an imperssion-it was Alec d´Ubbervilles.He was interested at her.Her father was allways drunken and he hadn´t wanted to work,this is why he sent her ask for money of him.But she rather wanted work at the house of Mrs d´Ubbervilles in Tantridge.Alec was love with her but she never loved him.One Saturday farm workers from surrounding area used to go dancing and drink two or three miles away.Tess didn´ go with them fo a long time and she met Alec.

It began to get foggy and alec admited he was lost.he left her to find out wher he were.he came back and tess felt asleep.He raped her.She became pragnant.Her child-named Sorrow died because it was ill.Tess left home for the second time.He was looking for some work in Valley of Little Dairies in Thalbothays.Dairyman named Mr.crick was glad to get a new diarymaid at this bussy time.She met hier Angel Clare.Whith whom were in love three diarymaids-Izzy.Marian,Retty.They felt in love.Angel wanted to marry her but Tess was thinking of her past.But eventually she said ,yes.Before the marriage she decided to tell him about her past but he said,, later´´.They became a married couple.the were living in old farm house.

Angel decided to tell her that he had did wrong with woman he hardly knew.
Tess to so she tell him about her past.Angel was exasperated and he still found it difficult to accept that Tess,the pure village maiden wasn´t she seemed.One night when Angel had been sleep walking Next day decided to go for some time to Brazil for work,she couldn´t write him.Tess went home to her parents and told them everything that happened.Her father mr.d´ubervilles died he had a heartattack.Tess wanted to know why Angel hadn´t written to her.She decided to walk 15 miles to met his parents in the church because it was Sunday morning.She heard talking Angel´s brothers that poor Mercy Chant why hadnt he married her instead of rushing into marriage with a dairymaid.Tess walked quickly past of them.But she met a parson-it was Alec d´ubbervilles.They were talking about their past and about Angel.He haf stopped preaching because of her and regrets what he had done but he is trying to attract her again.he is pesuading her that her husband will never get back.After long thinking Tess leaves this place with Alec.but soon Angel gets back and he meets his wife.

He knows that he made a mistake and so does Tess. She finds herself absolutely hopeless in this situation and kills Alec because she believes that he is guilty for all the bad things that have happened to her. By killing him she kills her past and nightmare. She leaves with Alec but she fully does not realise what she has done or she does not want to realise it because the only thing she desires for is to be with her beloved husband and to feel his renewed love to her. They are spending several days together hiding before the police and I think that Tess has never ever been so happy. Finally she has what she has always desired for.Tess is arrested and sentenced to death but her love remains in Alec’s memories.

Analysis of Major Characters
Tess Durbeyfield
Intelligent, strikingly attractive, and distinguished by her deep moral sensitivity and passionate intensity, Tess is indisputably the central character of the novel that bears her name. But she is also more than a distinctive individual: Hardy makes her into somewhat of a mythic heroine. Her name, formally Theresa, recalls St. Teresa of Avila, another martyr whose vision of a higher reality cost her her life. Other characters often refer to Tess in mythical terms, as when Angel calls her a “Daughter of Nature” in Chapter XVIII, or refers to her by the Greek mythological names “Artemis” and “Demeter” in Chapter XX. The narrator himself sometimes describes Tess as more than an individual woman, but as something closer to a mythical incarnation of womanhood. In Chapter XIV, he says that her eyes are “neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all these shades together,” like “an almost standard woman.” Tess’s story may thus be a “standard” story, representing a deeper and larger experience than that of a single individual.

In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth century. Possessing an education that her unschooled parents lack, since she has passed the Sixth Standard of the National Schools, Tess does not quite fit into the folk culture of her predecessors, but financial constraints keep her from rising to a higher station in life. She belongs in that higher world, however, as we discover on the first page of the novel with the news that the Durbeyfields are the surviving members of the noble and ancient family of the d’Urbervilles. There is aristocracy in Tess’s blood, visible in her graceful beauty—yet she is forced to work as a farmhand and milkmaid. When she tries to express her joy by singing lower-class folk ballads at the beginning of the third part of the novel, they do not satisfy her—she seems not quite comfortable with those popular songs. But, on the other hand, her diction, while more polished than her mother’s, is not quite up to the level of Alec’s or Angel’s. She is in between, both socially and culturally.

Thus, Tess is a symbol of unclear and unstable notions of class in nineteenth-century Britain, where old family lines retained their earlier glamour, but where cold economic realities made sheer wealth more important than inner nobility.
Beyond her social symbolism, Tess represents fallen humanity in a religious sense, as the frequent biblical allusions in the novel remind us. Just as Tess’s clan was once glorious and powerful but is now sadly diminished, so too did the early glory of the first humans, Adam and Eve, fade with their expulsion from Eden, making humans sad shadows of what they once were. Tess thus represents what is known in Christian theology as original sin, the degraded state in which all humans live, even when—like Tess herself after killing Prince or succumbing to Alec—they are not wholly or directly responsible for the sins for which they are punished. This torment represents the most universal side of Tess: she is the myth of the human who suffers for crimes that are not her own and lives a life more degraded than she deserves.

Alec d’Urberville
An insouciant twenty-four-year-old man, heir to a fortune, and bearer of a name that his father purchased, Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tess’s life. His first name, Alexander, suggests the conqueror—as in Alexander the Great—who seizes what he wants regardless of moral propriety. Yet he is more slippery than a grand conqueror. His full last name, Stoke-d’Urberville, symbolizes the split character of his family, whose origins are simpler than their pretensions to grandeur. After all, Stokes is a blunt and inelegant name. Indeed, the divided and duplicitous character of Alec is evident to the very end of the novel, when he quickly abandons his newfound Christian faith upon remeeting Tess. It is hard to believe Alec holds his religion, or anything else, sincerely. His supposed conversion may only be a new role he is playing.

This duplicity of character is so intense in Alec, and its consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes diabolical. The first part of his surname conjures associations with fiery energies, as in the stoking of a furnace or the flames of hell. His devilish associations are evident when he wields a pitchfork while addressing Tess early in the novel, and when he seduces her as the serpent in Genesis seduced Eve. Additionally, like the famous depiction of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Alec does not try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan, he revels in them. In Chapter XII, he bluntly tells Tess, “I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” There is frank acceptance in this admission and no shame. Some readers feel Alec is too wicked to be believable, but, like Tess herself, he represents a larger moral principle rather than a real individual man. Like Satan, Alec symbolizes the base forces of life that drive a person away from moral perfection and greatness.

Angel Clare
A freethinking son born into the family of a provincial parson and determined to set himself up as a farmer instead of going to Cambridge like his conformist brothers, Angel represents a rebellious striving toward a personal vision of goodness. He is a secularist who yearns to work for the “honor and glory of man,” as he tells his father in Chapter XVIII, rather than for the honor and glory of God in a more distant world. A typical young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees human society as a thing to be remolded and improved, and he fervently believes in the nobility of man. He rejects the values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own. His love for Tess, a mere milkmaid and his social inferior, is one expression of his disdain for tradition. This independent spirit contributes to his aura of charisma and general attractiveness that makes him the love object of all the milkmaids with whom he works at Talbothays.

As his name—in French, close to “Bright Angel”—suggests, Angel is not quite of this world, but floats above it in a transcendent sphere of his own. The narrator says that Angel shines rather than burns and that he is closer to the intellectually aloof poet Shelley than to the fleshly and passionate poet Byron. His love for Tess may be abstract, as we guess when he calls her “Daughter of Nature” or “Demeter.” Tess may be more an archetype or ideal to him than a flesh and blood woman with a complicated life. Angel’s ideals of human purity are too elevated to be applied to actual people: Mrs. Durbeyfield’s easygoing moral beliefs are much more easily accommodated to real lives such as Tess’s. Angel awakens to the actual complexities of real-world morality after his failure in Brazil, and only then he realizes he has been unfair to Tess. His moral system is readjusted as he is brought down to Earth. Ironically, it is not the angel who guides the human in this novel, but the human who instructs the angel, although at the cost of her own life.

Key Facts
full title • Tess of the d’Urbervilles
author • Thomas Hardy
type of work • Novel
genre • Victorian, tragic
language • English
time and place written • 1880s, England
date of first publication • 1891
publisher • Random House, but also published serially in different periodicals