Tess of the D'urbervilles: A Pure Woman

The most dangerous thing a poor girl in Victorian England can possess is beauty, and Tess Durbeyfield has it in abundance. When her drunken father learns their humble family name is actually d'Urberville, a noble lineage rotted to poverty, he sees opportunity. But for Tess, this inheritance brings only trouble: a seduction by the predatory Alec, years of labor and shame, and a love story with the clergyman's son Angel Clare that might be her salvation, or her final ruin. Hardy titled this novel "A Pure Woman" to enrage his contemporaries, and one senses that fury still smoldering in every page. Tess is seduced, abandoned, driven to desperation, and yet she is the most morally alive character in the novel. The men who ruin her carry no consequence; she who suffers becomes the criminal. This is Hardy's devastating argument: that Victorian England built its morality on a lie, and the girl who breaks under its weight is the only one asked to pay the true price.