Lecture Thirteen概要1.pptVIP

Lecture Thirteen Jane Austen(1775-1831) Life and Achievements Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, whose well-stocked library gave his children great joy. She was educated at home and never lived apart from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. She lived in a quiet and uneventful life. Hoer closest friend was her sister, Cassandra, who also remained unmarried. Aside from doing domestic chores at home, Austen spent nearly her time composing and revising her novels. She did her work with extreme care, as if she was “working on a fine engraving made upon a little piece of ivory.” She wrote novels for her family when she was a little child. Her fame as a novelist depends upon six novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion (1818), Northanger Abbey (1818). Jane Austen was among the first English women to break male monopoly of novel writing. Her brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical novels vividly described the life of the common people in the countryside. Her main literary concern is about human beings in their social relationships. Her novels reveal in a subtle yet determined manner the physical and spiritual beauty of women, and their longing for freedom in marriage. Her unique sensibility to human emotions, her careful observation of the hypocrisy of the middle-class Englishmen, and their male chauvinistic attitude towards women, made her one of the finest novelists of the age. Though Austen is not a conscientious feminist novelist, her novels, such as Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, express female dignity and a longing for equality with men. Analysis of her masterpiece Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s masterpiece whose central character, Elizabeth Bennet, is one of the daughters in Bennet’s family. None of the daughters can inherit the estate of the family for it has been entailed upon the nearest heir, William Collins. Collins intends to marry and