How long does it take to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles?
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy takes about 8 hours 23 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 23 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1707. 457 pages, about 125,675 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 58 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 23 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 14 minutes |
The page count is the median across 747 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a journey that will see her victimized by lust, poverty, and hypocrisy. Shaped by an acute sense of social injustice and by a vision of human fate cosmic in scope, her story is a singular blending of harsh realism and poignant beauty. Thomas Hardy created in Tess not a standard Victorian heroine but a woman whose intense vitality shines against the bleak backdrop of a dying way of life. The novel shocked contemporary readers with its honesty and remains a timeless commentary on the human condition.
Subjects: Fiction, Man-woman relationships, fiction, Poor families, fiction, Women murderers, fiction, Children of the rich, fiction"
