Tess of the d’Urbervilles tells of Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be descended from the ancient family of d'Urberville. In her search for respectability her fortunes fluctuate wildly, and the story assumes the proportions of a Greek tragedy. It explores her relationships with two very different men，her struggles against the social mora;s of the rural Victorian world which she inhabits and the hypocrisy of the age.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in book form in 1891. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's it received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England. In addressing the double standards of the time, Hardy's masterly evocation of a world which we have lost, provides one of the most compelling stories in the canon of English literature.

Thomas Hardy, (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England.