First Love by Ivan Turgenev (1860)

Zinaida is twenty-one and keeps a parlour of grown men circling her for sport, and into that court drifts the sixteen-year-old from the estate next door, ruined before he knows what has touched him. She is fond of him, which is worse than the teasing she hands the others, because fondness leaves him nothing to fight. Turgenev drew the novella from his own boyhood, and the wound is dressed with a son's exactness. Then a night by the garden wall shows Vladimir who Zinaida truly loves, and it is not a rival of his own age but his own father, elegant and remote, holding her in a register the boy cannot yet imagine. What the book understands is how love first arrives at full adult power, before anyone is ready to carry it. The whip-mark she lifts to her lips, tenderness chosen in the teeth of cruelty, is among the most precise images in nineteenth-century fiction.