Dee Yates's story about Tess of the D'Urbervilles

TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES by THOMAS HARDY.
If you look carefully between the pages, you may find grains of sand embedded. The sand would belong to Swanage beach, the Knollsea of Hardy’s Wessex. The book was ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’, the MacMillan pocket edition, 1965 reprint, bought for ten shillings and sixpence from Austicks Bookshop, Leeds.
It was not the first of Hardy’s novels I had read. Introduced at fourteen to his colourful characters, lush countryside and lyrical descriptive style, I was already a convert. But this story of ill-fated love and questionable justice was, for me, the climax of his writing.
I was a medical student at the time. The book was a luxury I could ill afford. I can’t say that the story immediately changed my life but, looking back now, I can trace its influence on my later thinking and actions. I can’t say it influenced my choice of career ... the reasons for the path I chose were far more pragmatic. But Hardy’s ability to write about real people ... their uncertainties, their inconsistencies, their responses to the world around them ... helped me, I believe, to understand others ... and myself.
I could, of course, have knocked their stupid heads together, those two main characters in Hardy’s novel ... Tess, too honest and open for her own good, her every action carried out as though determined to deny herself the happiness she craves, Angel Clare with a blinkered moral inconsistency second to none. Perhaps it would not matter so much if they had loved one another less. But Hardy carries us along with their developing closeness, from the time when they stood
‘balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it’,
through Izz the milkmaid’s assertion that
‘nobody could love ‘ee more than Tess did! ...She would have laid down her life for ‘ee.’, to Angel’s belated avowal: -
‘I will protect you by every means in my power, whatever you may have done or not done’.
Such a love many of us search for. Some find it, only to see it cruelly snatched away. Maybe it’s the all too common human responses that get in the way of happiness.
In the last paragraph of my pocket edition, I had pencilled a question mark at the side of the statement‘‘Justice’ was done’. Justice? No happy ending then for Tess and Angel. No happy ending for many of the families I had the privilege of meeting in hospital, surgeries and clinics during my professional life. Hardy’s belief can be summed up in the words of the philosopher J.S. Mill:
‘If the Maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery and there is no escape from the conclusion.’
But even Hardy allows a glimmer of hope. Angel and his sister-in-law, ‘Liza-Lu, silently watched the fluttering black flag and
‘As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.’