Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

As with Hardy’s next and last novel, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles begins at a defining moment without which the subsequent events might never have happened. It is in this sense that Hardy’s beginning is the origin, or at least a starting-point, of Tess’s story. The opening provides the catalyst for Tess Durbeyfield’s transformation into Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the importance of which is conveyed in the names themselves. The surname Durbeyfield suggests a land-based family, while d’Urberville implies either a family of the urban and the town (ville is, of course, still French for town) or a transition to the city from the village, which is a late medieval word from the French village, and derived like many other words from the Latin villa (a villein was a peasant personally bound to a lord to whom dues and services were paid in return for land). In this way Hardy signals the ‘ache of modernism’ (Chapter 19) that many critics consider the main theme of the book: a transition from the communal life of the land towards the world of the anonymous teeming crowds of the city.