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I had never read “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” to my embarrassment, so I stuck with SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles,’ where Tess is doomed by hapless chance.

Before writing such classics as “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” Hardy worked for the architect Arthur Blomfield, whose firm was hired in the 1860s for an unappealing job: exhuming human remains, including recently buried ones, from the cemetery to make way for a new railway line.

In his 1891 novel, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Thomas Hardy evokes with a single sentence the slow fading of a constellation of once-dominant attitudes about time, space and money.

Analyzing beauty’s function in fiction, Wolf writes of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: “Without her beauty, she’d have been left out of the sweep and horror of large events. A girl learns that stories happen to ‘beautiful’ women, whether they are interesting or not.