The young and beautiful Eustacia Vye (Catherine Zeta-Jones) visits her grandfather in Egdon Heath, a country area in northern England, but quickly becomes bored and dreams of city life in Paris. When Egdon Heath native Clym Yeobright (Ray Stevenson) returns from Paris and falls in love with Eustacia, she agrees to the courtship in hopes of moving to the city with Clym. But Eustacia's attraction to the handsome Damon Wildeve (Clive Owen) forces her to choose between the two men.

"A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."
--- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

One of the greatest English tragic novels, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) is the story of a "pure woman" who is victimized both by conventional morality and its antithesis. Born near Dorchester, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) set most of his stories in the region between Berkshire and Dorset in the fictional county of Wessex. He was a controversial writer whose work often showed the result of flouting the...

Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice.

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.Charles Dickens was another important influence.Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel, the last to be printed without...

In Desperate Remedies a young woman, Cytherea Graye, is forced by poverty to accept a post as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe, the woman whom her father had loved but had been unable to marry. Cytherea loves a young architect, Edward Springrove, but Miss Adclyffe's machinations, the discovery that Edward is already engaged to a woman whom he does not love, and the urgent need to support a sick brother drive Cytherea to accept the hand of Aeneas Manston, Miss Adclyffe's illegitimate son, whose first wife is believed to have perished in a fire; however, their marriage is almost...