Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)

Hardy called her a pure woman, and Victorian England never forgave him the phrase. Tess Durbeyfield, a country girl sent to claim kinship with a rich family who bear her ancestors' noble name, is ruined by a man who takes what she will not give. She buries the child, returns to work as a dairymaid in the green Vale of Talbothays, and there meets Angel Clare, who loves her purely until the night she tells him what was done to her. Then he leaves. The whole book aches with the injustice of it: that a world will worship a woman's beauty and damn her for surviving the worst it does to her. Hardy writes the Wessex fields and seasons with such tenderness that the cruelty cuts deeper against them. Read it for Tess herself, who keeps her goodness when goodness has cost her everything, and for the slow gathering dread of where such a world must finally drive her.