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Tess of the D'Urbervilles is Hardy's masterpiece, one of the "Wessex series". It depicts the tragic fate of a rural girl. In the subtitle of the novel, Hardy refers to the heroine as "a pure woman", openly challenging the hypocritical social morality of the Victorian era.
The heroine Tess is born into a poor peddler's family, and her parents ask her to go to a rich old woman's house to climb into the family, as a result, she is seduced by the young master Alec, and later she falls in love with the priest's son Claire and gets engaged. Soon after Claire returns from abroad and expresses remorse to her wife for her past callousness, in which case Tess bitterly feels that it was Alec Deb who made her lose Angel for the second time and kills him in anger. She is eventually arrested and hanged. |
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