Thomas Hardy
1840–1928 · England
“Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
Thomas Hardy
1840–1928 · England
“Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Thomas Hardy
Drew From(4)
who shaped Thomas Hardy
via Prometheus Bound
- Hardy ends the novel by quoting Aeschylus — "the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess" — his own rendering of a line from Prometheus Bound
- It recasts Tess's destruction as the idle sport of an indifferent, cruel god, the Greek tragic frame snapped shut over a Victorian story
- Read Aeschylus first and the final sentence stops being a flourish — it's Hardy reaching back across two and a half millennia for a god worth blaming
- The intellectual bedrock under Tess — Hardy called himself "among the earliest acclaimers" of The Origin of Species and attended Darwin's funeral
- Tess is destroyed by heredity and indifferent chance: Darwin's struggle for existence reimagined as the doom of one country girl
- Read Darwin first and Hardy's cruelty makes sense — there is no providence in this novel, only the blind, ruthless nature The Origin described
via Paradise Lost
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles casts its seduction as Eve's fall, with Alec as Milton's Satan
- Hardy makes the debt unmissable — Alec names himself 'the other old one, come to tempt you,' and the text quotes Satan's seduction of Eve from Paradise Lost (9.626-31)
- Read Milton first and Tess's ruin reads as a fall from Eden into a world with no redemption waiting — the Eden gone, only the Satan left
via Jane Eyre
- Tess reads as Hardy's darker answer to Jane Eyre — the same question of what a woman can claim for herself, set against Brontë's more hopeful reply
- Brontë gave Jane hard-won autonomy and even resurrected the saintly, fated Helen Burns into meaning; Hardy revisits both and strips out the mercy
- Read Jane Eyre first and Tess's tragedy sharpens — you can feel exactly which promises of the earlier novel Hardy refuses to keep
Inspired(2)
who Thomas Hardy shaped
via Sons and Lovers
- Hardy was, by Lawrence's own account, his master and principal influence. The year after this novel he wrote the book-length Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), brooding over Hardy's heroines as he worked out his own theory of art.
- The Wessex machinery turns up in the Midlands: a landscape that conditions its people, and the flesh-versus-spirit split Lawrence read in Hardy's women. Paul Morel torn between the spiritual Miriam and the sensual Clara is Lawrence reworking that dichotomy in his own terms.
via Howards End
- Hardy gave Forster the model for bringing the poetic charge of the English countryside into the novel. Howards End — the farmhouse, the wych-elm, the land that 'feels ours' against the encroaching commercial sprawl — follows Hardy's quest to make rural England carry myth and meaning.
- Forster singled out Tess herself in Aspects of the Novel as the one Hardy character who 'conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny,' the exception to his complaint that Hardy bent his people to the plot. Tess stayed with him.
Famous Quotes
“"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.”
“I am ready.”
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one? — A blighted one.”
About Thomas Hardy
English novelist and poet whose fiction depicted the harsh realities of rural life in his fictional Wessex. After savage critical reception of Jude the Obscure, Hardy abandoned the novel for poetry, becoming one of the most distinguished English poets of the twentieth century. His novels combine fatalism, social criticism, and lyrical attention to the natural world.