“ If an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come than that the truth be concealed. ”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). copy citation
| Author | Thomas Hardy |
|---|---|
| Source | Tess of the d'Urbervilles |
| Topic | truth offense concealment |
| Date | 1891 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/110/110-h/110-h.htm |
Context
“I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book's opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome's: If an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
T.H. November 1891.
Author's Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe.” source
T.H. November 1891.
Author's Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe.” source
Meaning and analysis
