Tess of the d'Urbervilles

A girl walks across the fields of Wessex with a horse, and everything changes. This is the opening of one of English literature's most devastating novels, Thomas Hardy's 1891 masterpiece that scandalized Victorian England by daring to call its ruined heroine "pure." Tess Durbeyfield, a peasant girl with ancient blood in her veins, is seduced by the wealthy Alec d'Urberville, abandoned by society when she becomes pregnant, and ultimately driven toward an act that will destroy her. Hardy maps the brutal mathematics of Victorian morality: a woman loses everything for the same sin a man commits without consequence. The Wessex countryside, rendered in Hardy's richest prose, serves as both sanctuary and prison, a pastoral world of staggering beauty that offers Tess no escape from her fate. This is naturalist tragedy at its most ruthless, a novel that insists on the indifference of social institutions and natural forces to individual happiness. Tess endures because it transforms one woman's destruction into an indictment of the civilization that destroyed her, and because its prose still carries the weight of that long-ago autumn, those iron-gray skies, and the terrible sweetness of a life that might have been.