"Tess has become a national icon, like Heathcliff, a melodramatic archetype, regarded as common cultural property, who has taken on a life independent of the original novel. The fact that a production is unfaithful to Hardy is almost irrelevant. Hardy saw the lives of the humblest labourers as a Greek tragedy. His novels are remorseless litanies of misery and despair. I suspect that townies who romanticise rural life will be doomed to spend aeons in purgatory as the wretched characters in his novels to punish their sentimentality."