Tess of the d'Urbervilles (version 3)

A young woman with ancient blood in her veins and nothing in her purse. Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kinship with the wealthy d'Urbervilles, a journey that sets in motion a chain of events no amount of innocence can prevent. Thomas Hardy maps the terrain of a society that damns a woman for the very thing done to her, while absolving the men who do it. Tess moves through the fields and villages of Wessex like a figure from Greek tragedy, caught in the machinery of fate, class, and sexual hypocrisy. When she falls for the man who claims to see her truly, she learns that even love has its conditions. This is a novel that made Victorian England gasp, not for its plot, but for its insistence that virtue and ruin could inhabit the same body. Hardy called her "a pure woman," and the controversy that followed proved exactly why.