Tess does not manage to meet the family matron, Mrs D’Urberville, and instead has to deal with her son, Alec. They are a nouveau riche family who have taken the name D’Urberville to add an ancient aristocratic air to their recent wealth. The D’Urbervilles, though, are no relation to the Durbeyfields. Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself.

In the Durbeyfield countenances there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Feeling a level of guilt and duty her parents never would, Tess embarks as requested.īut the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a striving family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it would only have meant inconvenience. Joan encourages her daughter to seek out the D’Urberville family that has established itself near the town of Tantridge and claim kinship with them. Their eldest child, Tess, has a greater appreciation for responsibility and respectability yet it is Tess who may reduce them to beggars after she has an accident that results in the death of the family horse. John, though, has just been informed that he is in fact descended from the noble D’Urberville’s, a family who go back to the time of Norman conquest and rule, now all but disappeared. Both are easily content with a life of bare sustenance and simple pleasures, with little care for ambition or reputation and providing just the essentials for their young children. Somewhat unreliable and irresponsible, not to mention a drinker, John has an equal partner in his wife, Joan. John Durbeyfield is a poor peasant from the village of Marlott.

When a second chance at life unexpectedly arrives, Tess knows it is futile to try and escape her past, but the possibility of happiness in an otherwise miserable life is a great temptation. Though ‘more sinned against than sinner’, in an unequal society, the damage to her reputation is irredeemable.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the story of a young woman from a poor family, objectified, harassed and pursued by an older man with wealth and power over her.

Tess D'Urberville by Thomas Hardy