English · Advanced
Read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Englishwith every sentence explained
Thomas Hardy · 1891
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About the book
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was first published in 1891. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 148,400 words.
A poor girl. A noble name. A meeting that will change her life forever.
In the quiet villages of Wessex, Tess Durbeyfield is a beautiful, proud and kind-hearted young woman from a struggling family. One day her lazy, cheerful father learns from a local parson that they are descended from the d'Urbervilles, an ancient family of knights. Dreaming of money and status, her parents send Tess to claim kinship with a rich family of the same name nearby.
There she meets the charming and dangerous Alec d'Urberville, and the course of her life is set. Torn between duty and desire, innocence and the harsh judgements of society, Tess must find her own way through a world that gives women very few choices.
Thomas Hardy's masterpiece shocked Victorian readers. Today it is one of the most powerful and heartbreaking novels in English, and it has been adapted many times for film and television.
- Author
- Thomas Hardy
- First published
- 1891
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 148,400 words
How it opens
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular.
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
