"Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is Hardy's tragic masterpiece. It is the story of innocence and evil, of man and nature, of history and its relations to the present, concentrated on the fate of a simple country girl.
Reading Hardy's novels one can easily recognise the Greek writers view on man: a being born to endure that which was to befall him. The English writer conceived almost all his heroes as variants of certain types, without endowing them with too much inner depth. They only have to face the essential hypostases of Fate which is the principle around which all the Hardian stories spin. It is a notion designating the power that predetermines events.

Tess, the main character of the novel, is a simple innocent country girl, who tries to escape her social background under the pressure of exterior circumstances; she is forced to fight the principles of evil, embodied by Alec, but she cannot resist; she sins, therefore she is punished.
Alec is the symbol of evil, the embodiment of the wickedness and unscrupulousness of the implacable world in which man is obliged to live.