Hardy’s Vision of the Individual in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Abstract

Among the notebook entries which Hardy selected for inclusion in his Life are a number which can be seen to contain the germ of a later novel or poem. Sometimes Hardy himself draws attention to their significance, as in the famous note of 28 April 1888: ‘A short story of a young man — “who could not go to Oxford” — His struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide. [Probably the germ of Jude the Obscure.]’.¹ The bracketed annotation is Hardy’s own, not Florence Hardy’s, as Michael Millgate’s edition makes clear. In other instances there is no authorial pointer, but the reference is so specific that the connection of note and later work can hardly be missed, an example being the note of 30 September 1888 which identifies ‘ “The Valley of the Great Dairies” — Froom’ and laments the ‘decline and fall of the Hardys’.² Here some of Hardy’s preoccupations as he began composition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles are unmistakably signalled. Whatever his strictures on biographical intrusions, Hardy clearly felt that the search for the genesis of a novel or poem was a legitimate literary enquiry, and was happy to give a helping hand.