In 1856, Thomas Hardy was not yet the acclaimed novelist he would later become. Hardy was then a 16-year-old architectural apprentice. That was when he witnessed the hanging of a woman dressed in black, in the rain. That was Elizabeth Martha Brown, convicted of murdering her husband. Many years later, still haunted by the experience, he wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, about an impoverished and abused woman who was also convicted of and executed for murder.
The stories of the fictional Tess Durbeyfield and the historical Elizabeth Martha Brown are not the same, but their lives both illustrate how powerless woman were victimized by men and held to double standards in the Victorian era. You may have already read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, or you may have seen one of the many film and TV adaptations. You can read the real story of Elizabeth Martha Brown, the woman who inspired Hardy to write it at Mental Floss.
(Image: The 1924 film Tess of the d'Urbervilles)