Extract

Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.

A country girl walks to a village dance in the long May twilight, and from that evening her life becomes a study in how the world punishes beauty it cannot possess on its own terms. Thomas Hardy published this novel in 1891, subtitling it "A Pure Woman" in defiance of the moralists who would condemn his heroine. Tess moves through the Wessex landscape like a figure in a painting that keeps darkening, her fate shaped less by her choices than by the desires of the men who claim to love her. Hardy binds her so closely to the fields and seasons that her suffering feels geological, a feature of the earth itself. The final scene at Stonehenge completes the identification: she belongs to the ancient, sacrificial order of things.