Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Setting 1 key example

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is set in England during the Long Depression—a period of economic recession from around 1873 through 1879, though some historians claim that the effects of this recession continued well into the 1890s. This period coincides with the Victorian era, a time period during which standards for sexual morality (especially for women) were quite high and strict. Victorian literary Realism was immediately followed by a period of experimental Modernism, during which literary convention, form, and style were all upended to produce haunting, stream-of-consciousness writing with undefined or apparently directionless plot arcs. Hardy's novel seems to preface this undoing of the modern world—the unsettling nature of oncoming modernity—and even mentions this haunting existentialism directly.