Tess of the d'Urbervilles

A woman destroyed by Victorian gender roles — published eight years after Tess, but similarly concerned with the impossibility of female autonomy in a society that denies it

Hardy's companion tragedy to Tess — where Tess is destroyed by gender, Jude is destroyed by class and education. Both end in death and official indifference.

Eliot's Dorothea Brooke faces many of the same structural constraints as Tess, but survives them. The contrast illuminates what Hardy's fatalism adds to — and subtracts from — the social-realist tradition.

The French forerunner of the 'fallen woman' novel written without the author's intrusion — Flaubert's cool irony versus Hardy's moral fury are the two poles of nineteenth-century naturalism

Class mobility and its costs, set in Victorian England — Pip's desire to transcend his origins parallels Tess's structural impossibility of escape, though Dickens allows his protagonist to survive

Another woman navigating the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality in Victorian England — but Brontë's universe, unlike Hardy's, allows Jane agency and a survivable resolution