Tess of the d'Urbervilles

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in Thomas Hardy's compelling masterpiece of tragic fiction.

Nann Blaine Hilyard - Library Journal

Hardy's classic 1891 novel, about a young woman's attempt at redemption following a scandal, demonstrates his fatalistic view regarding free will. Audie® Award winner Simon Vance's reading is straightforward, well paced, and clear, even when the characters speak in West Country dialect. This is an excellent choice for public libraries wanting to boost their classics collections, and the accompanying fulltext PDF ebook (which can be played in tandem with the MP3 recording) makes it useful also for high school and academic libraries. [Audio clip available through www.tantor.com; alternate recordings recently available from Blackstone Audio (12 CDs. unabridged. 2008. ISBN 9781433214998. $110; 1 MP3CD. ISBN 9781433215001. $44.95) and Naxos AudioBooks (14 CDs. unabridged. 2008. ISBN 9789626348673. $89.98).-Ed.]

Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy focused much of his work -- including classics like Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) on man's futile struggle against unseen forces. Of his rather unromantic outlook on life, Hardy once said, "Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed."