简奥斯汀27181249.ppt

* She has the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiments. ——Sir Walter Scott Sense and Sensibility Pride and Prejudice Mansfield Park Emma Northanger Abbey Persuasion 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. Jane 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 fathers extensive library provided material for the short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl. At the age of 14 ,Jane wrote her first novel, Love and Friendship 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. Sense and Sensibility is a novel which was published in 1811. It was the first of Austens novels to be published, under the pseudonym “A Lady”. The story concerns two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood (Elinor representing sense and Marianne sensibility). Along with their mother and younger sister Margaret, they are left impoverished after the death of their father, and the family is forced to move to a country cottage, offered to them by a generous relative. Elinor forms an attachment to the gentle and courteous Edward Ferrars, unaware that he is already secretly eng