
                                  Thomas Hardy

                           Tess of the D'Urbervilles

                       A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

                     Explanatory Note to the First Edition

The main portion of the following story appeared - with slight modifications -
in the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult
readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic
sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those
periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel
together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.
    I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as
an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of
the book's opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who
cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember
a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome's: If an offence come out of the truth,
better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.
                                                                            T.H.
    November 1891.
 

                    Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions

This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an
event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of
protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it
was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the
book, and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in
fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe.
But the responsive spirit in which Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been received
by the readers of England and America, would seem to prove that the plan of
laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to
square with the merely vocal formulæ of society, is not altogether a wrong one,
even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an achievement as the present.
For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my
regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship,
where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never
meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by
the hand.
    I include amongst them the reviewers - by far the majority - who have so
generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the others, have
only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative
intuition.
    Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic
