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美国文学评论巨匠爱德蒙·威尔逊说:“在英国文学近一又四分之一世纪的历史上,曾发生过几次趣味的革命,惟独莎士比亚和简·奥斯丁经久不衰。”《理智与情感》是奥斯丁处女作,与《傲慢与偏见》堪称姐妹篇。
内容简介
When Mr. Dashwood dies, he must leave the bulk of his estate to the son by his first marriage, which leaves his second wife and three daughters (Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret) in straitened circumstances. They are taken in by a kindly cousin, but their lack of fortune affects the marriageability of both practical Elinor and romantic Marianne. When Elinor forms an attachment for the wealthy Edward Ferrars, his family disapproves and separates them. And though Mrs. Jennings tries to match the worthy (and rich) Colonel Brandon to her, Marianne finds the dashing and fiery Willoughby more to her taste. Both relationships are sorely tried. But this is a romance, and through the hardships and heartbreak, true love and a happy ending will find their way for both the sister who is all sense and the one who is all sensibility.
The Dashwood sisters are very different from each other in appearance and temperament; Elinor's good sense and readiness to observe social forms contrast with Marianne's impulsive candor and warm but excessive sensibility. Both struggle to maintain their integrity and find happiness in the face of a competitive marriage market.
《理智与情感》讲述了:埃莉诺和玛丽安两姐妹生在一个体面的英国乡绅家庭,姐姐善于用理智来控制情感,妹妹却往往在情感上毫无节制,因此在恋爱中碰到挫折时,她们作出了不同的反应:姐姐忍辱负重,始终与人为善;妹妹心高气傲,几近崩溃……与主人公命运情牵相关的闲得发慌的乡绅太太,势利无情的兄嫂一家,市侩虚伪的远房姐妹,以及少女心中那三位或道德败坏或正直优柔的恋人悉数登场。全书以喜剧开头,悲剧发展,终以喜剧收场,是一则以细腻笔触和生动对白见长、讲述没有富裕嫁妆的少女婚恋的经典故事。
作者简介
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 at Steventon near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until in May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on July 18, 1817.
As a girl
Jane Austen wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were only published after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1818 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.
简·奥斯汀,是英国著名女性小说家,她的作品主要关注乡绅家庭女性的婚姻和生活,以女性特有的细致入微的观察力和活泼风趣的文字真实地描绘了她周围世界的小天地。
精彩书评
As nearly flawless as any fiction could be.
--Eudora Welty
"In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, "Sense and Sensibility" is Austen's insightful representation of early 19th-century middle-class provincial life. This edition features a new Afterword."
-- Revised reissue.
目录
INTRODUCTION
CHRONOLOGY OF JANE AUSTEN'S LIFE AND WORK
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF Sense and Sensibility
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
NOTES
INTERPRETIVE NOTES
CRITICAL EXCERPTS
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INTERESTED READER
精彩书摘
Sense and Sensibility, the first of those metaphorical bits of "ivory" on which Jane Austen said she worked with "so fine a brush," jackhammers away at the idea that to conjecture is a vain and hopeless reflex of the mind. But I'll venture this much: If she'd done nothing else, we'd still be in awe of her.
Wuthering Heights alone put Emily Brontë in the pantheon, and her sister Charlotte and their older contemporary Mary Shelley might as well have saved themselves the trouble of writing anything but
Jane Eyre and
Frankenstein.
Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, is at least as mighty a work as any of these, and smarter than all three put together. And it would surely impress us even more without
Pride and Prejudice (1813),
Mansfield Park (1814), and
Emma (1815) towering just up ahead. Austen wrote its ur-version,
Elinor and Marianne, when she was nineteen, a year before
First Impressions, which became
Pride and Prejudice; she reconceived it as
Sense and Sensibility when she was twenty-two, and she was thirty-six when it finally appeared. Like most first novels, it lays out what will be its author's lasting preoccupations: the "three or four families in a country village" (which Austen told her niece, in an often-quoted letter, was "the very thing to work on"). The interlocking anxieties over marriages, estates, and ecclesiastical "livings." The secrets, deceptions, and self-deceptions that take several hundred pages to straighten out-to the extent that they get straightened out. The radical skepticism about human knowledge, human communication, and human possibility that informs almost every scene right up to the sort-of-happy ending. And the distinctive characters-the negligent or overindulgent parents, the bifurcating siblings (smart sister, beautiful sister; serious brother, coxcomb brother), the charming, corrupted young libertines. Unlike most first novels, though, Sense and Sensibility doesn't need our indulgence. It's good to go.
In the novels to come, Elinor Dashwood will morph into Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet (who will morph into Emma Woodhouse); Edward Ferrars into Edmund Bertram, Mr. Knightley, Henry Tilney, and Captain Wentworth; Willoughby into George Wickham and Henry Crawford. But the characters in Sense and Sensibility stand convincingly on their own, every bit as memorable as their later avatars. If Austen doesn't have quite the Caliban-to-Ariel range of a Shakespeare, she can still conjure up and sympathize with both Mrs. Jennings-the "rather vulgar" busybody with a borderline-unwholesome interest in young people's love lives, fits of refreshing horse sense, and a ruggedly good heart-and Marianne Dashwood, a wittily observed case study in Romanticism, a compassionately observed case study in sublimated adolescent sexuality, and a humorously observed case study in humorlessness. "I should hardly call her a lively girl," Elinor observes to Edward, "-she is very earnest, very eager in all she does-sometimes talks a great deal and always with animation-but she is not often really merry." Humorlessness, in fact, may be the one thing Marianne and her eventual lifemate, Colonel Brandon, have in common. (Sorry to give that plot point away; it won't be the last one, either. So, fair warning.) The minor characters have the sort of eidetic specificity you associate with Dickens: from the gruesomely mismatched Mr. and Mrs. Palmer to Robert Ferrars, splendidly impenetrable in his microcephalic self-complacency. The major characters, on the other hand, refuse to stay narrowly "in character"; they're always recognizably themselves, yet they seem as many-sided and changeable as people out in the nonfictional world.
Elinor makes as ambivalent a heroine as Mansfield Park's notoriously hard-to-warm-up-to Fanny Price. She's affectionately protective of her sister Marianne yet overfond of zinging her: "It is not every one who has your passion for dead leaves." She's bemused at Marianne's self-dramatizing, yet she's as smug about suffering in silence as Marianne (who "would have thought herself very inexcusable" if she were able to sleep after Willoughby leaves Devonshire) is proud of suffering in Surround Sound. She can be treacherously clever, as when Lucy Steele speculates (correctly) that she may have offended Elinor by staking her claim to Edward: " 'Offended me! How could you suppose so? Believe me,' and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity, 'nothing could be farther from my intention, than to give you such an idea.' " Yet she can also be ponderously preachy: "One observation may, I think, be fairly drawn from the whole of the story-that all Willoughby's difficulties, have arisen from the first offense against virtue, in his behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents." (In the rest of Austen, only the intentionally preposterous Mary in Pride and Prejudice strikes just this note: "Unhappy as the event may be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson; that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable . . ."). Is Elinor simply an intelligent young woman overtaxed by having to be the grown-up of the family? Or is she an unconsciously rivalrous sibling, sick of hearing that her younger, more beautiful sister will marry more advantageously? Or both? Or what? It's not that Austen doesn't have a clear conception of her-it's that she doesn't have a simple conception. Elinor is the character you know the most about, since Austen tells most of the story from her point of view, and consequently she's the one you're least able to nail with a couple of adjectives or a single defining moment.
Edward bothers us, too. He's a dreamboat only for a woman of Elinor's limited expectations: independent-minded yet passive and depressive, forthright and honorable yet engaged in a book-long cover-up. (It's a tour de force on Austen's part to present a character so burdened with a secret that we see his natural behavior only long after we've gotten used to him.) At his strongest and most appealing-to Elinor, at least-he's a clear-your-mind-of-cant kind of guy: "I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. . . . A troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world." But he can also be a Hamlet-like whiner, complaining about his own idleness and vowing that his sons will be brought up "to be as unlike myself as possible. In feeling, in action, in condition, in every thing." For my money, Edward is the least likable of Austen's heroes, while his opposite number, Willoughby, is the most sympathetic of her libertines: smarter than Pride and Prejudice's Wickham (a loser who gets stuck with the "noisy" and virtually portionless Lydia Bennet) and more warmhearted than Mansfield Park's textbook narcissist Henry Crawford. Willoughby may strike trendy Wordsworthian poses with his effusions on cottages ("I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness is attainable"), but at least he has enough sense to abhor his own callowness, and enough sexy boldness to discompose even the rational Elinor. "She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess . . ." His opening line when he at last explains to her what he's been up to ("Tell me honestly, do you think me most a knave or a fool?") is one of those Byronic flourishes that make him the person in Sense and Sensibility you'd most want to dine with and least want to trust.
前言/序言
《迷雾之森的低语》:一个关于失落与救赎的史诗 作者: 阿莉西亚·范德比尔特 装帧: 精装典藏版 字数: 约 45 万字 --- 内容梗概:在古老誓言与现代迷惘之间徘徊的灵魂挽歌 《迷雾之森的低语》是一部宏大、细腻且充满哲学思辨的长篇小说。故事背景设定在十九世纪末至二十世纪初的英格兰北部,一个被工业革命的钢铁洪流逐渐吞噬的边陲小镇——艾尔德维克。这里,古老的庄园、神秘的林地以及根深蒂固的贵族传统,与新兴的商业阶层和日益高涨的社会变革诉求,形成了一道充满张力的文化断层。 小说的主人公,伊莱亚斯·索恩爵士,是艾尔德维克庄园的最后一位继承人。他继承的不仅仅是宏伟却日渐衰败的石砌府邸,更是一份沉重的家族历史和一桩尘封已久的誓约。索恩家族世代守护着一片被称为“静默之径”的古老森林,传说森林深处隐藏着影响小镇命运的关键秘密。然而,伊莱亚斯并非一个典型的浪漫主义英雄。他是一位受过严谨古典教育的植物学家,他的世界观建立在精确的观察和逻辑分析之上,对家族流传的那些模糊不清的传说和迷信抱持着一种近乎冷酷的怀疑态度。 故事始于伊莱亚斯收到的一封匿名信件。信中提及,他失踪多年的妹妹——薇奥莱特,并非如官方记录所言死于一场意外的狩猎事故,而是被卷入了围绕着“静默之径”及其所蕴含的某种“自然秩序”的纷争之中。这封信,如同投入平静湖面的一块巨石,彻底打破了伊莱亚斯刻意维持的理智生活。 为了寻找薇奥莱特并探究家族秘密的真相,伊莱亚斯不得不与外界势力周旋。他首先面对的是来自伦敦的资本家集团——“铁砧联合”。这群新兴的实业家,由冷酷无情的塞拉斯·格雷夫斯领导,他们视森林为可供榨取的资源,计划大规模砍伐“静默之径”,以建立一座庞大的钢铁冶炼厂。他们的到来,不仅威胁着当地的生态环境,更挑战着索恩家族维系了数百年的地域平衡。 在与格雷夫斯集团的对抗中,伊莱亚斯遇到了小说中至关重要的女性角色——卡珊德拉·洛克伍德。卡珊德拉是一位具有前卫思想的年轻地质勘测师,她受雇于“铁砧联合”,但很快,她便被森林中超乎寻常的生态现象和索恩家族历史的复杂性所吸引。卡珊德拉代表着理性科学的尖端,她试图用现代地质学和生物学来解释那些被当地人视为“魔法”的现象。她与伊莱亚斯之间的关系,是一种充满智力碰撞和情感克制的相互吸引。他们的合作,是科学与传统、逻辑与直觉的艰难融合。 随着调查的深入,伊莱亚斯和卡珊德拉发现,薇奥莱特的失踪与森林深处的某种“活着的记忆”息息相关。他们挖掘出家族历史中一段被刻意抹去的篇章:索恩家族的先祖曾与这片土地上一个隐秘的、近乎原始的社群达成了一项契约,确保人类的侵略不会彻底摧毁森林的“核心”。 小说的叙事结构采用了双线并行的方式。第一条线是伊莱亚斯追寻妹妹的踪迹,揭露阴谋的现代悬疑;第二条线则是通过薇奥莱特留下的日记碎片,回溯至二十年前,展现了薇奥莱特作为一个敏感而叛逆的年轻女性,如何被森林的“呼唤”所吸引,并选择了一条与主流社会格格不入的道路。薇奥莱特的故事,是对个体自由意志与家族责任之间冲突的深刻探讨。 关键冲突与主题探索: 1. 理性与本能的辩证: 伊莱亚斯必须学会超越纯粹的科学分析,去理解那些无法被公式量化的“情感链接”和“土地的意志”。他的情感觉醒,是通过对妹妹近乎绝望的寻找而被激发出来的。 2. 现代性对传统的侵蚀: “铁砧联合”的工业扩张,象征着十九世纪末资本主义对自然和传统美学的无情碾压。小说细腻地描绘了蒸汽机轰鸣声如何盖过教堂钟声,以及工人阶级的艰辛生活如何被上层的贪婪所忽视。 3. 失落与救赎: 薇奥莱特是否真的“失踪”?或者她是否仅仅是回归了她认为更真实的存在状态?伊莱亚斯最终的救赎,不在于找到一个明确的答案,而在于他是否能找到勇气,去拥抱家族历史中的不完美,并为之承担责任。 高潮部分设定在严冬来临之际,格雷夫斯的爆破队准备进入森林的核心区域。伊莱亚斯、卡珊德拉,以及一群被唤醒的当地居民(包括一些被视为“迷信者”的老人们),必须在最短的时间内,利用古老的知识和现代的策略,设置最后的防线。这场对峙不仅仅是人与机器的较量,更是关于“何为真正拥有”——是拥有土地的产权,还是拥有与土地共生的权利——的终极哲学辩论。 《迷雾之森的低语》不仅仅是一部关于寻亲或环保的叙事,它更是一部关于如何在快速变化的时代中,锚定个人价值和道德准则的史诗。通过对复杂人物群像的刻画,作者成功地营造出一种既有古典文学的厚重感,又不失现代小说叙事节奏的独特氛围。读者将被卷入一个充满迷雾、低语和不可磨灭的情感印记的世界中,直到最后一页,真相与和解的界限依旧模糊不清,令人深思。 --- (本书包含大量手绘的庄园地图、植物素描以及薇奥莱特未完成的诗歌手稿复印件,极具收藏价值。)