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The story of Tess Durbeyfield, a low-born country girl whose family find they have noble connections.

Gemma Arterton in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (2008)

If it were possible to fall in love with a fictional character, I would have fallen in love with Tess

This is the first BBC dramatisation of this wonderful novel by Thomas Hardy, which I have read several times. I first knew it from the Roman Polanski film which has a different approach to casting - Tess was played by Nastassja Kinski who was more obviously sexual in her appearance, and Angel Clare was Peter Firth, who to me had more charisma than Eddie Redmayne. I loved that film and it was very upsetting to watch, when I was in my teens. Now I&#39;m older and wiser, but Tess&#39;s story is so tragic that it still has enormous sadness. I felt that the protagonists in this version were more believable as young people living in a rural community, but the romance between Tess and Angel was not very convincing. Angel was well represented as a weak man who makes bad decisions, but he could have been more attractive, to persuade me that all the milkmaids were in love with him. So on the whole, although the story was told in faithful detail and well done, it didn&#39;t excite me in the way I expected. I always have sympathy for Tess as a character - whether or not she was technically raped is open to interpretation, but the main facts are that she was an innocent girl who was preyed upon by one man and let down by another. However, to be a tragic heroine, she possesses character flaws that allow her to succumb to the events that overcome her. It is a sad story that has relevance still, and it is a good introduction for viewers who have never read the wonderful book.

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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Hardy&#39;s &quot;Tess of the d&#39;Urbervilles&quot; is set in Dorset (or &quot;South Wessex&quot; as Hardy called it) during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of Teresa (&quot;Tess&quot;) Durbeyfield, a beautiful and innocent country girl who is seduced by a wealthy gentleman, gives birth to his illegitimate child, and is eventually, after numerous vicissitudes of fortune, hanged for his murder. I am always surprised that such a landmark of English literature has only once been filmed for the cinema during the sound era- and that version was made in France by a Polish director. There have been several television adaptations, but this is the only one I have seen. I will not say too much about Polanski&#39;s &quot;Tess&quot; which I have not seen for many years. I said that Tess was &quot;seduced&quot; by Alec d&#39;Urberville, but in this version she is actually raped. Given that Hardy was writing in the more restrictive moral climate of the 1890s, it is unsurprising that his account of what happens between them is rather vague, but my interpretation has always been that she consents to have sex with him, not out of love and certainly not out of sexual desire, but out of a mixture of fear and misplaced gratitude for certain acts he has done to help his family; she is too naive to realise that his supposed kindness is motivated by self-interest. If Tess is the innocent victim of a physical rape, this in my view changes the meaning of the novel in a way which Hardy did not intend. He described Tess as &quot;a pure woman&quot;, intending this description to be a deliberate challenge to Victorian prudery. If she were the victim of rape, few Victorians, however prudish, would have regarded her as &quot;impure&quot;. More importantly, if Tess is raped rather than seduced, this changes the way in which we see another key scene in the book, the scene in which Tess is rejected by her husband, Angel Clare, when he learns about her past. If we see Tess as having been seduced, then Angel&#39;s action, although unfeeling (and hypocritical given that he has a similar lapse in his own past), is nevertheless comprehensible in the light of his psychology and world-view and of the Victorian double standards which held women to a higher standard of behaviour than men. If Tess has been raped, then Angel&#39;s behaviour seems both incomprehensible and utterly unforgivable. When I first read the novel I imagined Tess as a blonde, rosy-cheeked country maiden; ever since I first saw Polanski&#39;s film I always have imagined her as a dark-haired, pale-skinned, ethereal beauty, with a fey, haunted look about her- in other words, as Nastassia Kinski, even if Kinski looks rather too Slavic for Wessex. The makers of this film perhaps shared my vision, as Gemma Arterton is not dissimilar to the young Kinski in looks. She gives a sterling performance, bringing out Tess&#39;s innocence and vulnerability, as well as an underlying strength of character. Hans Matheson, although perhaps younger and better looking than I had imagined the character, also copes well with the difficult role of Alec. The reason this role is a difficult one is that Alec is such a mercurial, inconstant, changeable individual. At some times he can seem like the wicked Squire Jasper in a melodrama, yet at others- especially when he undergoes an unexpected religious conversion- he can seem much more sympathetic, knowing he has done wrong in the past and desperately wanting to make amends for the wrongs he has committed. Moreover, the Alec we see in his religious period must always seem perfectly sincere and well-intentioned- there must be mo suggestion that this is just a pose designed to impress Tess, making it all the more shocking when Alec relapses back into his old self. The one actor in a major role I did not like so much was Eddie Redmayne as Angel. He was good when expressing the cold, priggish side of Angel&#39;s character. Angel, the freethinking son of a pious clergyman, represents the growing force of religious scepticism in late Victorian England, although his views on sexual morality turn out to be just as puritanical as those of his father&#39;s generation, if not more so, keeping the Christian injunction to hate the sin while rejecting that to love the sinner. There is more to Angel than priggishness, however, and I felt that Redmayne lacked the charisma and sex appeal which enable Angel to captivate Tess. (And not just Tess. Several other girls at the dairy where she works also lose their hearts to him). Among the minor characters I liked Ian Puleston-Davies and Ruth Jones as Tess&#39;s parents John and Joan. John Durbeyfield, a drunken carter, is one of Hardy&#39;s great tragicomic characters. The comedy comes from John&#39;s insistence that he is really a great nobleman, a delusion encouraged by the eccentric local parson who has been struck by the similarity between John&#39;s surname and that of the once powerful but now extinct d&#39;Urberville family. (Alec, incidentally, is not a member of this family. He is the son of a self-made businessman who changed his surname out of snobbery). The tragedy comes from the fact that this delusion makes him unable to cope with real life. The Dorset scenery is striking, which is how it should be in an adaptation of a Hardy novel. He had not only a deep feeling for the English countryside but also the ability to convey this feeling in vivid descriptive prose. This is not, however, mere description for description&#39;s sake; the landscape becomes a vital part of the structure of his novels- at times it can almost be regarded as a character in them- and Hardy uses description of the natural scene in order to amplify his descriptions of his characters&#39; feelings. There are two passages in &quot;Tess&quot; which particularly exemplify this. The first comes when Tess, following the death of her illegitimate son, is working as a dairymaid on a farm in the Frome valley in southern Dorset; it is here that she meets Angel. The second comes when she has been abandoned by Angel and is forced to find work on a farm on the Dorset Downs, slightly further north. The scenes set in the valley take place in summer, and Hardy&#39;s writing is dominated by images of heat, of ease, of fertility and of luxuriant growth, symbolising the burgeoning growth of Tess&#39;s hopes for her future happiness. The scenes set on the bare, stony Downs take place in winter, and the imagery is of cold, of hardship and of bleakness, symbolising the dashing of those hopes. The makers of this serial were able to find settings which matched Hardy&#39;s descriptions, which adds to the power of the story. Hardy used to speak of her as though she were a real person, and wrote &quot;I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me&quot;. If it were possible to fall in love with a fictional character, I would have fallen in love with Tess and so, I suspect, would most of Hardy&#39;s readers. The novel has been one of my favourites- possibly my all-time favourite- ever since I came across it as a teenager. It is therefore perhaps difficult for me to be objective about any adaptation of it, as no such version could do full justice to my vision of the book, but this series is a decent attempt. 7/10.

User reviews

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Good adaptation

If it were possible to fall in love with a fictional character, I would have fallen in love with Tess

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