Why doesn't Tess just confess? : Hardy, at least a near-great writer

I'm really getting won over by "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and Hardy's amazing ability to create a whole world - it did take a while for me to become absorbed, which in a way is the mark of many great works of literature, their styles are so distinct that it takes a bit to come to know them and to read the vocabulary. At first I was feeling my way through it, trying to place Hardy in a literary context, but by the half-way point I am taken by the characters and their moral dilemmas, their strengths and failings, their humanity. Start with Tess - part of me was screaming at her, why don't you just tell Angel Clare about your past, about the child you bore "in sin," he loves you and he will forgive you, you can move to America and nobody will care. It struck me that 19th-century Wessex was such a different world, people didn't really talk and spill out their lives in confessions. But then after their wedding she does tell him - and he is stunned and revolted. He's not as good a man as she'd thought, as we'd thought. And we then look back and think, yes, maybe part of his attraction to her was his belief that she was from fallen nobility, despite his many protestations that class doesn't matter, perhaps to him it does matter all too much, he's a weak and bloodless man. What makes it so great is the way Hardy dramatizes these emotions through tempestuous almost cinematic scenes: Tess and Angel walking along the riverbank on a stormy night, he's a few paces ahead of her, a passing stranger wonders what could be tormenting this young couple. This is a novel imbued with its landscape, a setting so unusual, almost unique for fiction. Hardy may not have had the great broad comic vision of a Dickens or the interior acuity and stylstic inventiveness of the modernists but his work reads even today as well as any of them - if not a great writer definitely a near-great.