Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Summary

Poor country girl Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kinship with the wealthy d'Urberville family, where Alec d'Urberville takes advantage of her, setting in motion a life of hard labor, lost love, and social condemnation. Hardy subtitled the novel A Pure Woman and dares his readers to judge Tess as harshly as her world does, building toward a devastating ending at Stonehenge. The novel's open assault on Victorian sexual hypocrisy made it one of the most controversial and most moving English novels of its century.