PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (傲慢与偏见)

作者简介：
　　JANE AUSTEN was born at Steventon Parsonage, Hamp- shire, England, on Decem- ber 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children. She was educated, in the main, by her minister-father, and began her literary career by writing parodies and sketches for the amusement of her family. Her first twenty-six years were spent in the quiet of the rectory. In 1801 the Austen family moved to Bath in an attempt to restore the health of the father. Upon his death in 1805 they moved to Southampton, and finally to Chawton, Hampshire, in 1809. Though her life was uneventful, placid, and cir- cumscribed, Jane Austen was highly sensitive to what went on around her. Her observations on the manners of her time and of her class were incorporated in her novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Preju- dice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816). On July 18, 1817, at Winchester, Hampshire, the author died, as quietly and serenely as she had lived. 

Jane Austen characterized Pride and Prejudice in a famous letter to her sister Cassandra as "rather too light, and bright, and spar- kling; it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte." Her readers have not felt the Jack of tedious digres- sions, and it has remained one of her most popular works. It is an astonishing accomplishment for a young woman of twenty-one, and on each rereading, one can only discover new subtleties, new ironies. Unlike her other early novels, Norlhanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. it has an extraordinary poise and coherence of subject and style, and although it is indeed bright and spar-kling, it by no means lacks shades of meaning. The brilliance with which "sense" is unobtrusively subsumed in plot continues to compel admiration. The elegance of this performance is almost beyond praise.