Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Thomas Hardy poured his deepest anger and tenderness into this novel of a young woman crushed between accident, class and a merciless code of respectability.

What it's about

Tess of the d'Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl whose family, learning they may descend from an old noble line, sends her to seek help from wealthy relations, with fateful results. What follows carries her through betrayal, labour, love and loss across the farms and dairies of Hardy's imagined Wessex, as she is pursued by the consequences of a wrong done to her and by a society determined to blame the victim. Two very different men shape her fate, and the story moves with a terrible inevitability toward its close.

Themes

Hardy indicts the double standard that punishes a woman for what is done to her, and he sets human longing against an indifferent universe and a rigid social order. Fate, injustice, purity and the destruction of the natural in the name of the proper run all through the book, which Hardy pointedly subtitled "A Pure Woman."

Why it still matters

The novel's fury at hypocrisy and its compassion for the wronged have lost none of their force, and its questions about who is judged and by whom remain urgent. Hardy's Wessex, beautiful and doomed, endures as one of fiction's great imagined worlds.

Who it's for

For readers of the great English novels, for those moved by stories of injustice and endurance, and for anyone ready for tragedy written with unmatched feeling.