Tess Of The D'Urbervilles

Tess is Hardy's most striking and tragic heroine and the character who meant most to him.
In a novel full of poetry and mysteriously luminous settings, he unfolds the story of his beautiful, suffering Tess with peculiar and unforgettable tenderness and intensity. As A. Alvarez comments: 'the plangent, heartbroken note of the great poems of loss and missed chances...is already present in Tess: in the continually roused, haunting descriptions of the landscape which crystallize intermittenly into visionary states of mind, and above all in the power and beauty of the heroine whom he created and then, unwillingly, destroyed.'