Inspirations for Tess

[kev67]

I haven't read Tess of the D'Urbervilles but I'm wondering why you say that Hardy was taking artistic licence over the execution of of his heroine. The last woman to be executed in England was Ruth Ellis: hanged in 1955 for the murder of her lover David Blakely who had deserted her for another woman.

Ruth Ellis shot her lover with a gun, so it was premeditated murder. The British judiciary had stopped applying the death penalty except for cases of poisoning and gun crime a long time before. They would be sentenced to death, but then be reprieved. Tess's crime was a spur of the moment thing (although there was a bit of desperate calculation in it). The landlady heard everything. In the real world I doubt she would have died because she would have had a good lawyer, who would have milked her tale of woe for all it was worth.

Edit: according to Wikipedia, Ruth Ellis emptied a revolver on David Blakely. She missed with the first shot, chased him and finished him off when he was lying on the ground.

[Maple]

I read somewhere that a while after Tess' publication he met an important judge at a social event. When the subject of Tess' punishment came up the judge told Hardythat absolutely her execution was the appropriate punishment, and it would have been his, too. Hardy was reportedly surprised.

Whether Hardy was taking literary license with Tess' fate, I have no opinion. However, there's no question he was willing to go to extremes in his plots. I believe he called these intensifications. More than that, he enjoyed making up words because somehow he felt they added something. Reading any of his prose one can sense he was at heart a poet.