Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hardy's great indictment of Victorian sexual hypocrisy dressed as a love story. Angel Clare's love for Tess and his inability to accept her past is fiction's most painful portrait of conditional love. Hardy's title page declares her "a pure woman"; the whole novel is the argument that love, too, must be unconditional or it is nothing.
Hardy stacks the deck and then blames the cards. Coincidence does the plotting (the confession letter slides under the carpet, unread, dooming everything), and when Tess finally hangs, the narrator intones about the President of the Immortals as if fate, not the novelist, arranged it all. Alec and Angel are positions in an argument. Only Tess is a person; that, admittedly, almost suffices.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
