Recommendations from our site
“One of my favourite sections of any book in literature is the part where Tess goes to work on the dairy farm and meets Angel Claire. She’s just had such a hard, hard time, and then she has this experience of being provided for and taken care of by kind people. For once in her life, she’s safe and secure. Happiness suddenly happens to her, and it’s so unexpected. I know Angel has his issues, but Hardy is also using him to demonstrate society, cultural mores. He’s incapable for a long time to forego his religion and his society to be with her, and to accept her past. And I find it so moving and poignant—and a kind of lesson to us all, at any age. I think we all stumble into these situations when our heart, our emotion, our impulses, don’t match what people and society expect of us.” Read more...
The Best Literary Love Stories
Lily King, Novelist
“It’s very much about trying to find a place of happiness for yourself in a world full of obstacles, in a terrible maze of social change and convention at the end of the industrial revolution.” Read more...
Meg Rosoff, Children's Author
