Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. Its subtitle was deliberately provocative — Hardy intended the book as a fierce challenge to the Victorian moral code that punished women for the sins committed against them.

Tess Durbeyfield, a young peasant girl, is sent by her feckless parents to claim kinship with the wealthy d’Urberville family, where she is seduced and ruined by the predatory Alec d’Urberville. She later finds love with Angel Clare, an idealistic clergyman’s son, but when she confesses her past on their wedding night, he abandons her. Caught between two men and crushed by a society that offers her no forgiveness, Tess is driven through poverty, despair, and ultimately to a desperate act of violence. Hardy sets her story against the changing landscape of rural Wessex, where the old agricultural world is giving way to mechanization and indifference.

One of the great tragic novels in English, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a work of immense compassion and barely contained anger, its portrait of an innocent woman destroyed by circumstance and hypocrisy as powerful now as when it first scandalized Victorian England.