【英语论文】关于《傲慢与偏见》中真爱的探讨-True Love Revealed in Pride and Prejudice.doc

关于 之真爱的探讨Austen's apparent reticence in matters of contemporary politics has often provoked comment from critics. For most of her adult life, Britain was at war with France and experiencing casualties on an unprecedented scale. Her brothers, Frank and Charles, served in the Royal Navy, in careers that brought not only wealth and honour, but also constant danger. It is evident from comments in Austen's surviving letters that she was far from ignorant of the international conflict; many readers have therefore pondered over the relative absence of reference to current affairs in her fiction. The question is particularly acute in Pride and Prejudice, at once the most military and the most witty and effervescent of all the novels. Here the militia are embodied in force, and yet the regiment billeted at meryton seems designed to provide dancing partners for the local community, rather than protection against a foreign foe. It is hard to imagine Mr Wickham, Chamberlayne or Denny engaged in action other than in the ballroom or at the card table. When seen in the light of contemporary history, however, the anxiety generated by the militia takes on further dimensions. By 1813, when Pride and Prejudice was published, the British army was twenty times larger than it had been at the outbreak of the war. When the character of Mrs Bennet had been sketched out in the 1790s, her ambition of getting her daughters married off had probably seemed a relatively straightforward device to a young writer nurtured on eighteenth-century drama and comic novels. 15 years later, British women had endured the deep distresses brought on by prolonged hostilities- fear of food shortages, terror at the thought of military invasion, and, worst of all, the experience of losing sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends in the conflict. The sensitivity of Mrs Bennet's nerves begings to seem more comprehensible when the collective anxiety to which she has been subjected for so many years is taken into account, while her matrimonial obsessions acquire an altogether darker tone. As the death toll rose in successive campaigns against France, the numbers of eligible Englishmen were inevitably declining. If the political economist, the Revd Thomas Malthus, articulated widespread anxieties about the British population exceeding the nation's agricultural output, Mrs Bennet expresses a peculiarly feminie nightmare relating to the increasingly inadequate supply of husbands.Jane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from 18th century neo-classicism to 19th century romanticism. Jane Austen was born on 16 December, 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, near Basingstoke, in Hampshire. The seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, she was educated mainly at home and never lived apart from her family. She had a happy childhood amongst all her brothers and the other boys who lodged with the family and whom Mr Austen tutored. From her older sister, Cassandra, she was inseparable. To amuse themselves, the children wrote and performed plays and charades, and even as a little girl Jane was encouraged to write. The reading that she did of the books in her father's extensive library provided material for the short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl. At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Freindship (sic) and then A History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian, together with other very amusing juvenilia. In her early twenties Jane Austen wrote the novels that were later to be re-worked and published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. She also began a novel called The Watsons which was never completed. As a young woman Jane enjoyed dancing (an activity which features frequently in her novels) and she attended balls in many of the great houses of the neighbourhood. She loved the country, enjoyed long country walks, and had many Hampshire friends. It therefore came as a considerable shock when her parents suddenly announced in 1801 that the family would be moving away to Bath. Mr Austen gave the Steventon living to his son James and retired to Bath with his wife and two daughters. The next four years were difficult ones for Jane Austen. She disliked the confines of a busy town and missed her Steventon life. After her father's death in 1805, his widow and daughters also suffered financial difficulties and were forced to rely on the charity of the Austen sons. It was also at this time that, while on holiday in the West country, Jane fell in love, and when the young man died, she was deeply upset. Later she accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy landowner and brother to some of her closest friends, but she changed her mind the next morning and was greatly upset by the whole episode. After the death of Mr Au。