tess

i went this endearing little book shop & was suddenly drawn to hardy's tess of the d'urbervilles. reading james wood's introduction, i know why i was suddenly so interested in the text: "When we read these words, we recognize Tess as one of a company of nineteenth-century heroines: Austen's Anne Elliot and Fanny Price; George Eliot's Dorthea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth; James's Isobel Archer; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Flaubert'S Emma Bovary. [...] It is because these women are true characters that they seek to escape a world that merely characterizes them. But this Protestantism of the spirit, of the interior, carries the seeds of its own theological undoing, for once God is internalized, God may disappear altogether and become simply an appeal to the compass of one's own spirit. This is the anti-theological state Tess has reached [...]"