Tess of the D’Urbervilles Throughout the novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy focuses on the life of Tess Durbeyfield. Starting out as a young, innocent girl, Tess matures throughout the book to become a powerful woman who was capable of thinking for herself. Furthermore, she was also intelligent enough to realize her importance as an individual. At the beginning of the novel, Tess was portrayed as a young girl with too much responsibility for her age. She was sent out into the world at a very young age, and was unable to see the danger in life around her. Tess was the one who had to fetch her parents from the inn