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新东方网英语讯：《傲慢与偏见》即将发行200周年，这部作品是英国乡村一名老姑娘所写的第二部小说。这部小说原名《最初的印象》，它在完工17年后才得以出版发行。当奥斯汀重新准备发行该小说时，许多其他的小说已经以同样的书名面对读者，因此她用范妮·伯尼小说中的句子重新给她的小说命了名。范妮·伯尼是当时英国最著名的女性小说家。因此这部作品最终以《傲慢与偏见》为名出版发行。
While Britain may be a big player on the world movie scene, it remains proudest of its literary history. Last year, they celebrated Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday, and now another bicentennial has arrived - the anniversary of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice". The author surely would have never guessed that two centuries after it was first published, the novel has soared in popularity.
Today, it has an established place in popular culture, with fans around the world, and numerous cinematic adaptations to its name.
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"Pride and Prejudice" celebrates 200 years
On January the 28th, 1813, the public got their first read of Jane Austen’s classic novel "Pride and Prejudice". And its popularity still endures. Even today, it is many people’s favorite novel.
The house that Jane Austen lived in between 1809 and 1817 is now a museum. Its collection includes a first edition print of "Pride and Prejudice", Austen’s writing table and her hand-written letters.
Louise West, curator of Jane Austen House Museum, said, "I don’t think you’d say it was even her greatest novel, but it is certainly her most popular one. And it encompasses all that’s great about the other novels in the groundbreaking work that Jane Austen was doing in transforming the novel of the eighteenth century into a novel, very much like the ones we read today.”
Helen Conford, publisher of Penguin Books, said, "She sells incredibly well. If you look at her inside Penguin Classics with George Orwell, Shakespeare, F. Scott-Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, she’s really number one."
Austen’s works are now out of copyright, meaning anyone can publish her books. It’s nearly impossible to track sales and digital downloads, but the Publishers Association estimates that about 132,000 copies of Austen’s novels were sold in 2012 within the UK.
Richard Mollet, CEO of Publishers Association, said, "She writes engagingly about characters which I think the modern audience can enjoy as much as the audience in her time. And I suppose her work has, like all great writers, just a resonance and we can see in characters like the Bennets and like the Dashwoods, we can imagine their equivalents in the modern day and that’s what makes them so engaging."
The first Hollywood adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" was in 1940, but the most popular edition is the 1995 BBC drama starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The most recent version saw Kiera Knightly and Matthew Macfadyen in the lead roles... Spin-off movies, such as Anne Hathaway’s "Becoming Jane", have received critical acclaim as well. Even Bollywood fell in love with the tale, and produced a colorful adaptation in 2004 called "Bride and Prejudice".
And so, two centuries after it was first published, "Pride and Prejudice" continues to inspire new generations to put their own stamp on the timeless classic.
人物简介：
Jane Austen简·奥斯汀，（1775年12月16日-1817年7月18日)，19世纪英国小说家，世界文学史上最具影响力的女性文学家之一，其最著名的作品是《傲慢与偏见》和《理智与情感》，以细致入微的观察和活泼风趣的文字著称。
文化链接：
这部作品很畅销。然而奥斯汀却轻率地在小说出版前，以110英镑的价钱将版权卖给了出版商，放弃了所有后续的版税。这部小说在1813年1月出版。多亏一些赞扬的评论以及当年11月份的再版，1817年该小说又发行了第三版。出版商单是从前两版就盈利450英镑。同年，该小说又被翻译成了法语。
同时代的许多小说也都像这般历经曲折。然而简·奥斯汀的《傲慢与偏见》确实是从一个备受崇拜的宠儿变为当今的文学经典。当然，多年来奥斯汀一直是“简迷”们(19世纪和20世纪初奥斯汀狂热读者的简称)的独家珍宝。据记载，在19世纪60年代，温彻斯特大教堂的一名教堂司事曾经虔诚地问道“那位女性”是否有“过人之处”，因为如此多人询问她的公墓地址。1866年，一位读者曾写信给知名杂志《备忘和查询》，严肃地询问谁写了一本书叫《曼斯菲尔德庄园》，麦考利曾提到过这本书。
自此，奥斯汀开始声名鹊起。她的读者挖掘她所写的更多作品，并且享受这些作品带来的“副产品”，尤其是喜欢《傲慢与偏见》。该小说被多次拍成电影，其中包括1952年的电视剧版本。
《傲慢与偏见》之所以永垂不朽的原因就是它的喜剧性。奥斯汀后来曾说过，这部小说“过于光彩熠熠和充满活力，它需要阴影;如果可以的话，它想具备更深刻的意义向更深层次的方向延伸;反之，它想带着这些严肃、似是而非的废话去干些与小说无关的事情，比如关于写作的散文、对沃尔特·司各特的评论或者波拿巴家族的历史……”
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发表于 2016-7-12 22:03:45