Tess of the D'urbervilles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) is a novel by Thomas Hardy. Tess Durbeyfield is the oldest child of John and Joan, uneducated peasants living in an impoverished rural village in Wessex, during the Long Depression of the 1870s. One day, her father is given the hint that they may have noble blood and that they are successors of a noble Norman family D'Urberville. Tess' fortune is changed after one accident and she decides to visit Mrs. D'Urberville, a rich widow who lives in the nearby town, and 'claim kin'. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and Hardy's masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles originally received mixed reviews because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.