Tess Durbeyfield, peasant girl with aristocratic ancestry, is seduced, abandoned, married, abandoned again, and finally hanged for murder. Hardy called it 'a pure woman faithfully presented' and the adjective provoked outrage. The novel traces how society, circumstance, and male desire destroy a woman whose only crime is existing. Hardy's Wessex landscape broods over every scene; the ending, at Stonehenge, has the weight of ritual sacrifice. This novel, along with Jude, made Hardy abandon fiction for poetry.