Pride and Prejudice 傲慢与偏见

作者珍妮・奥斯汀（JaneAusten），生于1775年，卒于1817年，英国著名女作家，以描绘日常平凡生活中的普通人物名世。一生著有六部小说，《傲慢与偏见》是她的代表作。《傲慢与偏见》讲述的是一对青年的爱情故事，因一方的傲慢与另一方的偏见而导致好事多磨。作者以女性特有的敏锐和细腻观察、描绘了有钱、有闲阶级恬静舒适的田园生活以及绅士淑女的爱情与婚姻，以高超的艺术技巧反映了18世纪英国乡镇日常生活情景，给当时小说创作吹进了朴素的现实主义之风，在英国小说史上起着承上启下的作用。小说情节曲折，富有戏剧性，语言清新流畅，充满机智，是奥斯汀最受欢迎的一部小说。

Pride and Prejudice, first published on 28 January 1813, is one of Jane Austen's novels, and is her second published novel.
Pride and Prejudice, like most of Jane Austen's works, employs the narrative technique of free indirect speech. By using narrative which adopts the tone and vocabulary of a particular character (in this case, that of Elizabeth), Austen invites the reader to follow events from Elizabeth's viewpoint, sharing her prejudices and misapprehensions and being surprised along with her when events prove these to be mistaken.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.

Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree.

给当时小说创作吹进了朴素的现实主义之风，在英国小说史上起着承上启下的作用。小说情节曲折，富有戏剧性，语言清新流畅，充满机智，是奥斯汀最受欢迎的一部小说。