Tess of the d'Urbervilles

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless.

Seven-phase descent from Marlott innocence through Alec's violation and Angel's betrayal to Stonehenge arrest and execution tightens social and moral constraint with classical inevitability, so plot scores 91.

"'Tis the women's club-walking, Sir John. Why, your da'ter is one o' the members." "To be sure—I'd quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well, vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I'll drive round and inspect the club."

Tess the "pure woman" destroyed by naming, Angel Clare the idealist who fails her, Alec the seducer who converts and re-converts—Hardy's Wessex cast as agents of class and sexual hypocrisy, so cast scores 89.

She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and brothers out of some finery which d'Urberville had given her, and she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not.

Phase-based structure with pastoral dilation in Talbothays and compressed catastrophe in the final phases; the middle farms maintain steady moral pressure rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 84.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.

Hardy's lyric fatalism—the May-Day dance, the dairy idyll, the black flag—fuses landscape and moral condition; the Preface's Æschylean phrase sets the prose key of cosmic indifference, so prose scores 93.

The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey from London.

Marlott, Talbothays, Flintcomb-Ash, Sandbourne, and Wintoncester form Wessex as moral geography of class pretension and rural labor; the d'Urberville name is a trap disguised as inheritance, so world scores 92.

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him to the left of the road.

Phase the First—the club-walking maidens and the discovery of noble descent—establishes Tess as both natural vitality and social prey before the first violation, so hook scores 86.

I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book's opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome's.

The subtitle's ironic "Pure Woman" and the treatment of sexual victimhood as social murder—so controversial it ended Hardy's fiction career—anticipates modernist determinism, so innov scores 90.

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.

The black flag over Wintoncester is among the bleakest and most formally complete executions in English fiction; no mitigation, only the full weight of "justice," so ending scores 95.