The works listed will allow your students to further explore the theme of Morality Then and Now and other themes related to Tess of the d'Urbervilles:


Fiction
Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. 1874. Bathsheba Everdene becomes romantically entangled with an irresponsible soldier and an obsessive neighbor before finally accepting the unselfish devotion of the simple shepherd she formerly spurned.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Making of a Marchioness. 1903. In this novel of manners by a writer better known for her children's tales, a genteel but impoverished woman unexpectedly becomes the bride of a British nobleman, with near-tragic results. (average)

Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. 1893. Circumstance and society force a poor, innocent girl into prostitution and suicide in this famous short novel by Hardy's American realist colleague. (average)

Child, Francis James, collector. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 1898. A noted American folklorist's collection of the haunting folk compositions that many scholars liken to Hardy's fiction. Note especially "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight," which has a Dorset version, called "The Outlandish Knight," that Hardy remembered particularly from his childhood. (easy to average)


Nonfiction
Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Genius of Thomas Hardy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Accounts of Hardy's life, works, and legacy by notable writers such as Elizabeth Hardwick, A. L. Rowse, John Betjeman, David Cecil, and Drabble herself. (average to challenge)

Howard, Tom. Hardy Country. New York: Smithmark, 1995. A pictorial description of Hardy's Wessex. (easy)

LaValley, Albert J., ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. The viewpoints of Dorothy Van Ghent, Irving Howe, D. H. Lawrence, Douglas Brown, Edmund Blunden, and other authors of well-known Hardy criticism. (average to challenge)