"Cliff Notes - Tess of the D'urbervilles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Tess to claim kin with an inferior, but still wealthy branch of the
d'Urbervilles. He spends most of the night drinking, and the next
morning is too hung over to take his produce to market. Tess, a very
responsible young girl who knows her family's economic welfare is at
stake, drives the goods to market herself. Unfortunately she's not
used to controlling the horse, Prince, and she's also very sleepy,
having had to drag her parents home from the local pub the night
before. When she falls asleep, Prince runs into a passing mail wagon
and dies. Prince's death makes Tess feel guilty, as if she were a
murderess. She doesn't want to go begging to the d'Urbervilles, but
her guilt over Prince's death and her family's dire economic need
push her on. She comes to the d'Urberville estate at Trantridge and
is taken in by Mrs. d'Urberville's sensual, manipulative son, Alec.
It turns out that these d'Urbervilles are fakes--wealthy people named
Stoke who simply took an unused title as their own. Innocent Tess
has no idea that Alec isn't her cousin, which makes it easy for him
to take advantage of her. He gives her a job tending his mother's
chickens. Tess' folks mistakenly think this is a subtle way of
bringing her into this well-to-do family. Actually it's a way for
Alec to keep Tess under his wing. Finally one night in the old wood
known as The Chase, he rapes her.

For reasons that are unclear, Tess remains with Alec for a few weeks
after the rape. She hates herself for staying with a man she can't
love, though his attentions did dazzle her for a short time. Tess
leaves without giving him a chance "to do the right thing" and marry
her. Tess learns she's pregnant. She has the child, but it dies
soon after birth. She never tells Alec about their baby until they
meet again at Flintcomb-Ash.

In mourning and disgrace at having a child out of wedlock (a heinous
crime in Victorian England), Tess hires herself out as a dairymaid in
the distant Var of Froom. Here she hopes to forget the past. And
indeed, at Talbothays Dairy, amidst the green tracts of fertile,
expansive farmland, Tess begins to recover from her trauma. When she
meets Angel Clare, now a dairyman-in-training at Talbothays, she
fears he'll recognize her and somehow cause the horrors of her past
to surface. Angel, however, doesn't remember seeing her at Marlott
on that club-walking day so long ago. He's a gentleman apprentice,
and his eyes are on the future and the farm he hopes to start
someday. The youngest son of a fanatical Evangelist preacher, Angel
refused to become a clergyman because he believes in following the
spirit of the Bible rather than the letter. Angel is a heretic and
near-atheist who lives in dreams of a pagan, earthly paradise where
humankind and nature form their own harmonious religion.

Tess and Angel fall in love, but Tess refuses to marry Angel. She
believes that because she isn't a virgin she'd be an unfit wife for
such a wonderful man. Her romantic feelings are mirrored, often
comically, by the three other dairymaids who share her bedroom, Izz