Well this is monumentally depressing. It's been on my list of classics to read for a while now, though I've been put off slightly as, even though I didn't know the story, the book has a reputation for being, well, monumentally depressing. Poor Tess. Everything that can go wrong for her does, and the beauty of Hardy's prose, and the genuine sympathy he seems to have for his heroine, doesn't make up for the emotional train wreck that is reading about her life.

In many ways, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is an unflinching illustration of why feminism is necessary. Forced through economic necessity to work for a man she does not trust, who routinely harasses her, Tess is eventually raped by him and has, of course, no recourse. Oh, he offers to marry her but if it's a choice between the respectability of marriage to a monster and going home to bear an illegitimate child in shame, well. It's a brave choice, but one no victim should ever have to make. Of course all the blame and notoriety is hers, and just when she makes a new life with an apparently decent man, he finds out what happened to her. Angel Clare unbends enough to comment that she's "more sinned against than sinning" (big of you, you unbelievable prig) and we see in the wreck of a marriage just how belief in the necessity of feminine purity has undermined the sense and dignity of both husband and wife. Essentially abandoned, the worst is yet to come for Tess, because her rapist is back, apparently in love and blaming her for all his lack of self-control, and I don't even want to describe the rest of it. Safe to say that it's no surprise the ludicrous melodrama of an ending comes as something of a relief to our poor heroine.

Hardy's criticism of the judgements and moral choices of his characters is painful and accurate, and that last groping towards moral evolution in Clare, at least, shows how very badly the entire society portrayed in this giant heap of unhappiness needs such a development. Had Tess been treated, at any point, as a person valuable in her own right rather than the eternal victim, much of the worst of this could have been avoided. But she's not a person, not to the people around her. Not really. She's a woman, which is less - an empty vessel for unrealistic expectation and entitlement, and even the girls who are her genuine friends aren't enough to counter the crushing weight of religion and patriarchy that destroys her. I say it again: monumentally depressing.