Introduction

Abstract

Hardy’s final novel tells what is essentially the same story three times over, as Jocelyn Pierston falls in love with his cousin, then with her daughter twenty years later and her granddaughter twenty years after that. The Well-Beloved’s tale of an artist’s ‘genealogical passion’ might serve as a parable for Hardy’s own obsessive return as an author to family history themes. His fascination with hereditary patterns is writ large in the multi-generational structures that underlie so many of his plots, from the early A Pair of Blue Eyes to the final three novels of his career, all written in the 1890s, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and The Well-Beloved. It is also registered at the level of description, in the minute attention paid throughout his writings to genetic features traced upon individual bodies. Hardy’s narrator persistently notes not only the presence of such traits, but their origins, the conditions under which they emerge, and the often startling effects of their apprehension.