Tess of the D'Urbervilles

''The greatest tragic writer among the English novelists'' Virginia Woolf

With its depiction of the wronged ''pure woman'' Tess and its powerful criticism of Victorian hypocrisy, Tess of the D''Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy''s novels. When its heroine, Tess Durbeyfield, is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D''Urbervilles, meeting her ''cousin'' A...