Tess of the D'Urbervilles propelled Hardy to literary fame and fortune, but it was also the subject of heated discussion and disagreement over its attitudes to morality and social convention. Hardy had been forced to cut some passages from the original text before it could be published in family magazines, but was able to restore these in the book-form edition of December 1891 (referred to in this article). After that, the novel was reprinted regularly and revised by Hardy several times.
Tim Dolin in the Penguin Classics edition describes the text as being ‘in a more or less constant state of evolution from the late 1880s until at least 1919…’ (Dolin in Hardy, p. liii). These variations imply that Hardy never quite firmed up his opinions about the many themes which his novel covers and that readers must be prepared for uncertainty.
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