Critics’ Reviews

“The second edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Sarah E. Maier brings together a wealth of contextual materials, contemporary reviews, extracts from Hardy’s notebooks, and nineteenth-century debates about women, inviting the reader to respond to the challenge of the novel’s subtitle: ‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.’ It reprints two separately published stories, ‘Saturday Night in Arcady’ and ‘The Midnight Baptism,’ which Hardy salvaged from the expurgated text published in the Graphic and reinstated in the three-volume edition of 1891. Meticulously annotated and impressively documented, this new edition will be indispensable to students and scholars alike.” — Joanne Shattock, Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester