Tess of the D’Urbervilles: York Notes for A-level - everything you need to study and prepare for the 2025 and 2026 exams

York Notes for A Level: Tess of the D’Urbervilles includes features to help you achieve top grades, including extract analysis of key passages, to add extra in-depth information and also to demonstrate how to approach detailed analysis, a key skill in your exam. Students who can demonstrate this depth of understanding, linking out to contexts and critical interpretations, in their exam responses to Tess of the D’Urbervilles questions are likely to achieve a higher grade than those who comment on the novel in general terms. You might be asked, for example, to discuss moments in the novel where the narrator seems to look to Tess’s future fate, even while discussing the present moment, to explore the interplay of faith and doubt in nineteenth-century literature with reference to the novel and to discuss how the novel suggests that masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs.