Tess of India

I first heard of Tess when the movie came out in 1979.  I saw commercials for it.  And the star was beautiful so it caught my attention.  I remember seeing her forlorn on the back of a cart going down a dirt road.

Let me see if I can find a photo like that and how it compares to my memory.

Nope.  But it might be the same road, maybe on a different leg of the trip.



There was something that captured my imagination about Tess, and it was her haunting facial expressions. And since I wasn't allowed to watch it- I wonder if they showed a boob- I remembered it since then from thousands of television commercials I have seen.

Recently, a good friend handed me the book since she was moving and getting rid of things.  Because of Tess, I've started reading all things Hardy and just saw a movie that states that it was based on Tess of the d'Urbervilles.  It was not.  I didn't pick up the movie because I thought it had anything to do with Hardy, but because the actress on the DVD cover had a beautiful haunting face.  Once I saw that it was based on Tess I couldn't think of it any other way.  Maybe it was a pretty good movie. Maybe it wasn't.  I really don't know. All I could think of is that if Hardy wasn't in the public domain, no one would have said it was based on Tess because they wouldn't want to pay for nothing.

A d'Urberville always sounded like a place to me.  It ends with ville, like Nashville or Louisville.  But it's a family name and Darbyfield is its Anglicized version.  Once I got to that paragraph in the book, I was hooked.  Who wants to go through life as a Darbyfield if there's a chance to be seen as a D'Urberville?