Tess of the D'Urbervilles recap

After her father learns that their poor family descends from the ancient d'Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is sent to seek help from wealthy people who have adopted that name. Alec d'Urberville pursues and sexually exploits her, and Tess returns home to bear a child who soon dies. Seeking a new start at Talbothays dairy, she falls in love with Angel Clare and agrees to marry him. On their wedding night each confesses a past sexual experience, but Angel cannot extend to Tess the forgiveness she gives him. He leaves for Brazil while she endures poverty and harsh farm work. Alec reappears, first as a preacher and then as her persistent pursuer. After Tess's father dies and her family loses its home, Alec's material support draws her back to him. Angel returns repentant, but Tess believes their future has been destroyed. She kills Alec, flees with Angel, and is arrested at Stonehenge. Tess is executed, while Angel leaves with her younger sister Liza-Lu in accordance with Tess's last request.

In Marlott, the poor haggler John Durbeyfield learns from Parson Tringham that his family descends from the ancient d'Urbervilles. John and his wife Joan treat the discovery as a possible route to improved status, while their eldest daughter Tess is less impressed. At a village dance Tess briefly sees Angel Clare, a clergyman's son traveling with his brothers, but he leaves without dancing with her. That night John is too unsteady to take the family's beehives to market, so Tess drives the cart with her young brother Abraham. She dozes and the cart collides with the mail coach, killing the family's horse, Prince. Feeling responsible for the loss of the animal on which the household depends, Tess reluctantly accepts her mother's plan that she approach a wealthy family using the d'Urberville name and ask for assistance.

Tess visits The Slopes, where the prosperous Stoke family has adopted the d'Urberville name but has no blood connection to her. Alec d'Urberville, the young heir, is attracted to Tess and secures her a position tending his blind mother's poultry at Trantridge. Tess distrusts his attention but goes because her family needs the income. Alec repeatedly presses unwanted familiarity on her. After a late village outing leaves Tess isolated and in conflict with other workers, Alec offers to take her home, deliberately loses the way, and brings her into the Chase. There, while Tess is exhausted and dependent on him, he sexually exploits her. The social and economic imbalance that brought Tess to Trantridge has placed her under the control of a man she neither trusts nor loves.

Tess leaves Alec and returns to Marlott, rejecting his claim that she can call on him for help. She gives birth to a son and works in the fields while enduring the village's judgment. When the baby becomes gravely ill, Tess baptizes him herself as Sorrow because her father will not summon a clergyman. The child dies, and the church permits burial only in an unconsecrated corner of the graveyard. After a period of seclusion, Tess seeks work far from home at Talbothays dairy. The fertile new surroundings and the companionship of Dairyman Crick's household allow her to begin recovering. She meets Angel Clare again, now learning farming rather than entering the church. Angel is drawn to Tess, while her fellow dairymaids Marian, Izz, and Retty also love him. Tess tries to hold back because of her past, but she and Angel grow close and finally acknowledge their love.

Angel visits his clerical family and argues that Tess's practical abilities make her a suitable wife for a farmer, though he does not tell them her history. He proposes repeatedly, and Tess eventually accepts while trying several times to confess what happened with Alec. Circumstances and Angel's idealized view of her prevent a full conversation, so she writes him a letter; it slips unseen beneath his carpet. They marry. Soon afterward Angel admits that he once had a brief sexual relationship, and Tess forgives him. Encouraged, she tells him her own history. Angel reacts with a double standard: although he recognizes that Alec wronged her, he says the woman he imagined marrying is gone. After days of painful discussion, he decides they must separate and gives Tess money before preparing to go abroad. Tess returns to her parents, determined not to expose the full reason for the failed marriage.

Angel leaves for Brazil, where his plans begin badly. Tess spends little of the money he gave her and avoids asking his family for help, partly from pride and partly because she fears explaining their separation. She moves between seasonal jobs and eventually joins Marian at Flintcomb-Ash, a bleak upland farm where the winter labor is exhausting and the farmer treats her harshly. Retty and later Izz remain part of the women's fragile support network. Tess attempts to visit Angel's parents but loses her nerve after overhearing his brothers speak dismissively about the match. On her return journey she hears a traveling preacher and discovers that he is Alec d'Urberville, apparently converted under the influence of Reverend Clare. The encounter forces the two most painful parts of her life back together while Angel remains absent overseas.

Alec's religious zeal collapses after he meets Tess again. He blames her for distracting him, abandons preaching, and resumes pursuing her, offering financial security while arguing that Angel has deserted her. Tess rejects him and writes an anguished letter asking Angel to return, but no answer comes in time. When Alec insults Angel, Tess strikes him, yet his pressure continues. John Durbeyfield dies, ending the family's right to remain in their cottage. Tess, Joan, and the younger children are evicted and find their planned lodging unavailable, leaving them gathered beside the d'Urberville tombs with no home. Alec uses the family's destitution as leverage, promising to provide for them if Tess accepts him. Meanwhile Angel, chastened by illness and failure in Brazil, begins to understand the cruelty of his judgment and resolves to come home and find his wife.

Angel returns and searches for Tess, eventually finding her living with Alec in comfortable rooms at Sandbourne. Tess says that Alec convinced her Angel would never come back and that she surrendered in order to protect her homeless family. Angel leaves devastated. Tess then turns on Alec for deceiving her and destroying the reconciliation she had long wanted, and she kills him. She follows Angel, confesses the killing, and asks for whatever time they can still have together. They hide for several days in an empty house and then travel west until they reach Stonehenge. Tess falls asleep on an altar stone and calmly accepts arrest when the police surround them at dawn. She asks Angel to care for her sister Liza-Lu and hopes the two will marry. Later Angel and Liza-Lu watch from outside the prison as a signal announces that Tess has been executed. They leave together, carrying out the bond Tess requested at the end of her life.

Angel returns from Brazil changed by hardship and ready to forgive Tess, but finds that his change has come too late: poverty and her family's homelessness have driven her back to Alec, who has installed her at Sandbourne. Tess tells Angel that Alec persuaded her he would never return. After Angel leaves in despair, she blames Alec for destroying her chance of reconciliation and kills him. She catches up with Angel, and the two spend several hidden days together before traveling toward Stonehenge. There Tess rests on an altar stone, knowing that the police are near, and is arrested at dawn. Before they part she asks Angel to care for and marry her younger sister Liza-Lu after Tess is gone. Angel and Liza-Lu later watch the prison signal announcing Tess's execution, then leave together. Tess's death closes her struggle; the surviving pair carry out the personal bond she asked them to form.