Tess of the d'Urbervilles
A farmer's daughter is sent to claim kinship with a wealthy family and is destroyed by the consequences. Hardy subtitled the novel A Pure Woman, which was an argument rather than a description, and the book was attacked for it on publication.
The Wessex landscape is not scenery but a system: harvests, dairy work, wages and the long walk between villages. Tess is less a character than a person observed from a distance, and that distance is part of Hardy's method. The final chapters are almost unbearable, and deliberately so.
Public-domain status
First published in 1891. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Thomas Hardy died in 1928, so this work has been free to republish there since 1999.
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