Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D 'Urbervilles is the masterpiece of Thomas Hardy, a famous English novelist and poet (1840- 1928). Hardy was an architect when he was young and later became a professional writer. He has lived in the country for most of his life. His novels are all about the countryside, and the general title is Wessex, which is the ancient name of his hometown.

This novel describes the tragic experience of an insulted country girl Tess. Tess is a simple girl. She wants to make a living by her own hands and pursue her personal right to be at least happy. However, the powerful forces of society did not even spare such a weak woman, which eventually led to her tragedy. The novel has a strong tendency of anti-religion, anti-feudal morality and anti-bourgeois law. Although it was opposed by the British upper class at that time, it was loved by readers. Once published, it was quickly translated into many languages, and the novel was put on the screen many times, which brought Hardy a world reputation.

The d 'Urbervilles live in the beautiful and peaceful Brey Valley surrounded by mountains. Their family is poor. Old Deby is a rural peddler, doing some small business. A family of nine people eked out a living by farming with an old horse. One evening at the end of May, on the way to Mahler Village, Pastor Chong Gan told Debye a useless piece of news. He verified that Debei was originally a direct descendant of the local ancient warrior family D 'Urbervilles. Durbeyfield is lazy and likes to drink. He was as drunk as a fiddler that night when he learned that he was born into a noble family.

Because her father was drunk and couldn't deliver the goods, Debbie 17-year-old daughter Tess bravely shouldered the burden of selling beehives for her father. Who knows that on the way to the fair, the carriage she was driving collided with the mail car, and the old horse was killed, leaving the family without a source of livelihood.

Tess felt pain and shame for it. In order to help her family get rid of the difficulties in life, she obeyed her mother's arrangement and went to Chunruiji to meet a rich old lady of the D 'Urbervilles. Mr d 'Urberville is a businessman in the north of England. When he became rich, he was bent on settling down in the south of England and becoming a squire. So he chose an old surname "d 'Urberville" from the museum and pretended to be a gentleman. Tess and her parents know nothing about these situations.

Mrs d 'Urberville is an eccentric blind old woman. Her son Alei is a playboy in his twenties. As soon as he saw the beautiful Tess, he made up his mind to possess her. He asked Tess to raise chickens in his chicken farm. Tess raised chickens in Chunrui Ridge, which was completely promoted by Alec. Full of doubts, she refused his Duan Qin everywhere, but could not avoid him.

On a Saturday night in September, Tess and her companions returned to the village after finishing the collection. A group of drunken women abused Tess wantonly. Tess was ashamed and annoyed and wanted to leave the group as soon as possible. Alec, who was far behind, rode forward and asked Tess to get on the horse and leave. She got on Alec's horse without thinking. They rode for a while, and Alec had led the horse to a fork far away from Chunrui Ridge.

At midnight 1 point, when Tess found out, they had arrived at a very old forest paddock in England. It was dark and foggy in the Woods, and she couldn't tell the direction from the road. Tess was very scared. She wanted to walk back alone, but it was impossible. Tess is sitting on a pile of leaves and Alec is going to show the way. When he came back in the dark, he tripped over something. This fuzzy gray is Tess lying on a dry white leaf. Alec leaned down and his face touched hers. She is sleeping soundly, and the tears on her eyelashes are still wet. Darkness and silence enveloped the surroundings. ...

Tess was angry and hated. A month later, she left Chunrui with a heavy basket and walked home along the mountain road. When Tess came home, she told her mother this terrible thing. The only thing that makes her sad is that Alec is not going to marry her. Tess wants to cry. Soon the news about Tess spread around the village, and she was laughed at and talked about behind her back. She hid at home and was afraid to go out. To make matters worse, Tess found that terrible changes had taken place in her body. Soon, a little life came to her side, but before long, the child died, too.

Now, she clearly realizes that the road ahead is long and bumpy, and she has to trudge alone without sympathy and help. Thought of here, she was so depressed that she couldn't wait for a grave to appear in front of her eyes and plunge herself into it. She often asks herself, is a woman's chastity really gone forever? All living things have the ability to return to their original state. Why can't you break your virginity alone? She decided to leave her suffocating hometown because she knew her past and started her new life in a strange place.

Another spring came, and Tess left home for the second time to work as a milkmaid in Tabley dairy. The scenery here is picturesque and Tess is in a very happy mood. Here, she met a young man, Angie Clay. Clay is the son of a low-sect priest. He doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps, but wants to become a local farmer. He studied milking techniques in a dairy farm, and found that Tess, who was quiet, was different from other country girls, and he soon fell in love with her. He thinks Tess is a beautiful and naive girl, and thinks that only she is the most perfect, so he pays attention to her and approaches her.

They meet constantly, always in the hazy morning light, violet or pink dawn every day. Because milking requires getting up early, they are almost always the first to get up. When they came outside, the open grassland was in a state of isolation, and Guang Xiao was mixed with fog, which made them feel deeply isolated, as if they were Adam and Eve.

In their common work and life, they gradually developed a love affair, which gradually became hot. Clay's love for Tess changed his view of life. He wants to give up the right marriage arranged by his family and marry Tess, a natural daughter with a poetic mind. Although Tess loves Clay very much, the shame of losing her virginity in the past has overwhelmed her and made her feel very painful. She tried to tell Clay about the past several times, but the words came to her lips and she swallowed them back.

Tess was carrying a heavy cross on her back. She thought it was cheating for him not to tell Clay about her past. So, a few days before her wedding, she got up the courage to write and explain the past to Clay. She slipped the letter to Clemens and let him decide for himself. But the letter was tucked under the carpet and Clay didn't see it. On the wedding day, Tess found the letter under the carpet, destroyed it in disappointment and decided to tell her husband that night.

On their wedding night, they came to the rented new house, which was the mansion of Tess's ancestors. Before Tess told Clay about her past, Clay told a story about him. He once lived a dissolute life in London for 48 hours with an unknown woman. As soon as Clay said he had a sin to confess to Tess, Tess forgave him at once. After hearing Clay's story, she felt an indescribable lightness and joy, and felt that her sin was no greater than her husband's.

But never imagined that when Tess told her what had happened, Clay didn't forgive her. He opposed her mercilessly and laughed at Tess as a descendant of a fallen aristocrat, a country woman who didn't know what a decent woman was. No matter how much Tess begged, he was indifferent. Claiborne is a typical figure of this era in recent 25 years, with advanced thoughts and good heart. Although he tries his best to judge things from an independent point of view, once things go wrong, he is still a slave to stereotypes and customs. He abandoned Tess and went to Brazil alone.

Tess fell into loneliness. She silently endured and waited, hoping to get back together with Clay one day. In order to preserve Clay's reputation, she didn't want to tell her parents about her husband's departure after returning home, and she also concealed her identity as Mrs Clay. She subsidized all the living expenses left by Clay to her family. She had no life, wandered around and worked as a short-term worker.

In winter, Tess walks alone on her way to the plateau farm. She was dressed in women's clothes, half of her face was wrapped in a handkerchief, and her eyebrows had been pulled out. Passers-by can't help but get a fright when they see her appearance. Tess said to herself with tears in her eyes, "From now on, I will always dress up ugly, because Clay is not in front of me and there is no one to protect me. I only love him and I want other men to look down on me. " She went to work in Lenghuai, suffered from supercilious look and bullying, and was sent to other places by her employer to do rough work and heavy work for men. She kept feeding bundles of wheat in front of the fast thresher, and she was so tired that she couldn't breathe, but she still endured and waited for news from Clay, hoping to get back together one day.

A year later, on February 30, 65438, Tess heard a missionary bullying her. The missionary was Alec D 'Urberville. Alec was full of foul language four years ago, but now he is benevolent and moral, which makes Tess feel sick. When Alec met Tess, he dropped all his preaching and teaching and went to the farm to pester her. Tess slapped him angrily with leather gloves. But Alec doesn't want to rest. He threatened fiercely: "remember, wife, you haven't escaped from my palm before, and you still can't escape from my palm this time." As long as you are a wife, you have to be my wife! "

Tess couldn't stand the double oppression of heavy physical labor and Alec's endless pestering and threats, so she wrote a sincere long letter to Clay and begged him to save her from her suffering. At the same time, Tess's girlfriend, who works with her, also wrote a letter to Clay, hoping that he would come back to protect his wife.

Clay, who was far away in Brazil, suffered a lot, suffered from fever, and his ideal of farming was shattered. He also began to regret the past and realized that his behavior towards Tess was unfair and cruel. Although Tess's chastity has been defiled in the past, her character is noble. Clay realized his mistake, so he returned to England from Brazil to look for his wife, determined to get back together with her, but when he found Tess in the apartment by the sea, it was too late.

It turned out that Tess couldn't wait for Clay's reply after her father died. In order to get rid of the plight that her mother and five brothers and sisters have nowhere to live and no financial resources, she lives with Alec again. Seeing this, Clay left sadly.

Clay's return brought great pain to Tess. She felt that Alec had ruined her whole life. In desperation, she killed Alec with a knife and caught up with the departed Clay. The two men avoided the main road and the pursuit, and spent the happiest days after marriage in an empty house in the wilderness. Later, they came to the pagan altar with stone pillars. Tired Tess lay on the altar and told Clay that she hoped he could marry her sister Lisa after her death.

The police chasing them found them a few days later. Tess didn't panic when she saw these strangers, because she expected it. She stood up, shook off the dirt, and said quietly to those people, "I'm finished." Let's go. " At dawn, Tess walked peacefully to the execution ground under the escort of the police. Clay followed Tess's instructions and started a new life with Tess's sister.

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre 1847 is a novel with strong autobiographical elements. Although the story in the book is fictional, the life, environment and even many details of the heroine and many other characters are taken from the real experience of the author and the people around her. The author Charlotte Brontexq was born in a pastor's family in the north of England. When Charlotte was eight years old, her mother died young and she was sent to a boarding school. The living conditions there are extremely bad, and both her sisters died of lung disease. So Charlotte and her sister Emily returned to their hometown and spent their childhood in the desolate Yorkshire mountains. /kloc-At the age of 0/5, she entered the school run by Miss Wooler and worked as a teacher in this school a few years later. Later, she became a governess, but because she couldn't stand the discrimination and meanness of Miss Guo, she gave up her job as a governess. She had planned to start her own school, so she went to Italy with Emily and studied French and German with the help of her aunt. However, because no one came to study, the school failed. However, her experience of studying in Italy stimulated her strong desire to express herself and urged her to devote herself to the road of literary creation.

Jane Eyre, written in 1846, is Charlotte's second novel. She expressed her feelings with the struggle experience of a young woman of humble origin, which deeply touched the readers at that time. This novel was published in the autumn of 1847 under the pseudonym of Kohler Bell, and was reprinted twice the following year. This little-known writer Charlotte Brontexq thus entered the ranks of famous British novelists.

The uniqueness of Jane Eyre lies not only in the authenticity and strong appeal of the novel, but also in the fact that the novel has created an independent and enterprising female image that is not subject to secular pressure. The love story of Jane Eyre to Rochester in the novel vividly shows her fiery passion and sincere heart, and strongly reveals her love view. She despised the arrogance of powerful people, laughed at their stupidity, and showed independent personality and beautiful ideals. She boldly loved what she loved, but when she found that the person she loved still had a wife, she resolutely left the person and place she missed. The idea expressed in the novel, that is, women are unwilling to be assigned their position by society and demand independence and equality in work and even marriage, was extraordinary at that time and was also a great shock to the British literary world. At the fictional end of the novel, Jane Eyre gets a legacy and returns to the lonely and helpless Rochester. Although this plot is worthy of scrutiny, it reveals the author's ideal-women's independence and equality in economy, social status and family, and their unswerving loyalty to love.

Charlotte's writing style is also unique. Her writing is concise and vivid, simple and vivid, and the first-person narrative language makes the novel close to readers and reality. At the same time, the novel embodies the characteristics of European romantic literary tradition, and shows the author's rich imagination and poetic temperament. The author naturally uses dreams, hallucinations, premonitions, symbols and metaphors in his narration, which makes the "natural" realm of the novel hazy and wonderful.

In today's literary world, some people criticize novels for lacking a more rational and profound analysis of social reality. In the description of crazy women, excessive pursuit of the mysterious atmosphere of "Gothic novels" weakens the authenticity of expressing reality. In the description of Reverend St. John, he beautified his dedication to Christian missionary work, but concealed the nature of colonial cultural aggression. The reasons for these limitations in the novel are very complicated, some are limited by the author's own experience, some are due to the formal characteristics of the work itself, and some are due to historical limitations. In a word, the influence of Jane Eyre has been enduring for more than one hundred years, and the enthusiasm of writers and critics for it has failed. It is still a favorite book for readers.