Fire & Air

This is the story of Tess, a country girl that when she was 16 years old she was seduced by a man and she ended up loosing her husband and her life for that 'sin'. This sounds a simple story, but Thomas Hardy is an amazingly gifted writer and he manages to turn this melodrama into a real classic.Tess is beautiful and innocente and she remains to the end of the book. Tess' character is based on a contradiction. She is not stupid, on the contrary she is intelligent and she has great insticts, she dislikes Alec d'Urbevilles from the start, and she is quite educated for a poor country girl and as the writer says she could have been a teacher if her father hasn't been informed of his great lineage. However, she sometimes acts like a very silly girl and I do not mean that she let her self be seduced, on the contrary she tried really hard to avoid it, but of the blind affection and devotion to her unworthy husband. I like Tess, although sometimes I wanted to bitch slap her...