When the spirited and fiercely independent Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm, she becomes an instant anomaly in the rugged English countryside of the 19th century. Determined to run her own life and business, she soon finds her heart and her future entangled with three vastly different men who lay claim to her affection.
Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime.
Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic.
