Tess of the d'Urbervilles

When her poor family learns it descends from the noble d'Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kin, is seduced and ruined by Alec, and later loves and loses the high-minded Angel Clare, driven at last to murder and the gallows. Hardy sets the tragedy across his Wessex, drawn faithfully from real Dorset: the vale of Tess's village, the d'Urberville estate, the rich dairy country where she finds love, the bleak upland farm of her suffering, and Stonehenge, where she is taken at dawn.

John Durbeyfield

Marlott

The vale

In the quiet vale village of Marlott, Tess's feckless father learns that the Durbeyfields are the last of the ancient d'Urbervilles, and sends her off to claim kinship with a rich family of the name. Hardy opens in the deep, unspoiled country of the Blackmoor Vale, the ordinary rural world whose peace the empty vanity of a lost name is about to shatter.

Phase the First

inspired by Tess's home village of Marlott, in the Vale of Blackmoor, is drawn from Marnhull in Dorset; sited there in Hardy's Wessex.

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