Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman is the twelfth published novel of the English writer Thomas Hardy. It appeared first in a censored serial version in an illustrated newspaper in 1891, then in three volumes in the same year and as a single volume in 1892.

The novel is set in Hardy's fictional Wessex, in a rural England where the old families have decayed and the farming families live close to ruin. Tess is the eldest child of John Durbeyfield and his wife Joan. When the parson informs John of his supposed ancestry, the family decides that their fortunes can be restored through the connection, and Tess is sent to the home of a family that has taken the d'Urberville name and bought itself a position. What happens there, and the shame she is made to carry for it, shapes the rest of her life, including her later work as a dairy worker and her marriage to a man who cannot accept what she tells him about her past.

The book was published at a moment when Victorian assumptions about virtue and marriage were being openly disputed, and the criticism it drew on publication was considerable. Hardy's own view of his heroine is carried in the subtitle he gave the book.