阅读简·奥斯丁 Jane Austen在小说之家的作品!!! |
奥斯丁创作的小说,几乎都经过长时间的反复修订改写。她出版的第一部小说是《理智与情感》(1811) 。《傲慢与偏见》(1813) 是她的第二部作品。这两部作品,加上她去世后出版的《诺桑觉寺》(1818) ,都写于十八世纪的九十年代,通常算是她的早期作品。而《曼斯菲尔德庄园》(1814) 、《爱玛》(1816) 与《劝导》(1818) 则写于十九世纪,算是后期作品。
根据《简明不列颠百科全书》的说法,简.奥斯丁是“第一个现实地描绘日常平凡生活中平凡人物的小说家。她的作品反映了当时英国中产阶级生活的喜剧,显示了家庭文学的可能性。她多次探索青年女主角从恋爱到结婚中自我发现的过程。这种着力分析人物性格以及女主角和社会之间紧张关系的做法,使她的小说摆脱十八世纪的传统而接近于现代的生活。正是这种现代性,加上她的机智和风趣,她的现实主义和同情心,她的优雅的散文和巧妙的故事结构,使她的小说能长期吸引读者。当时 (十九世纪初) 流行夸张戏剧性的浪漫小说,已使人们所厌倦,奥斯丁的朴素的现实主义启清新之风,受到读者的欢迎。到二十世纪,人们才认识到她是英国摄政王时期 (1810-1820) 最敏锐的观察者,她严肃地分析了当时社会的性质和文化的质量,记录了旧社会向现代社会的转变。现代评论家也赞佩奥斯丁小说的高超的组织结构,以及她能于平凡而狭窄有限的情节中揭示生活的悲喜剧的精湛技巧。”
Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to Austen's development as a professional writer. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-five years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried and then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.[B] From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.
Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the eighteenth century and are part of the transition to nineteenth-century realism.[C] Austen's plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Like those of Samuel Johnson, one of the strongest influences on her writing, her works are concerned with moral issues.
During Austen's lifetime her works brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews. Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired mainly by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a far wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical. In popular culture, a Janeite fan culture has developed, centred on Austen's life, her works, and the various film and television adaptations of them.