Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — an aristocratic woman who abandons her husband and son for Count Vronsky and pays for it with her social destruction and eventual suicide — has been interpreted as both a victim of social hypocrisy and a study in self-destruction. Her psychological complexity, captured through Tolstoy's pioneering interior monologue technique, makes her the finest female character in European literature. The opening sentence — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — is the most famous in world literature.