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200岁的《傲慢与偏见》仍然招人爱戴的10个理由

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‘Pride & Prejudice’ was first published 200 years ago Monday, on Jan. 28, 1813

1813年1月28日，英国作家简·奥斯丁的第二部小说《傲慢与偏见》正式出版发行。2013年1月28日，《傲慢与偏见》200岁了。英国和美国举办了多种活动为这部经典作品庆生。200年来，《傲慢与偏见》的读者可谓长盛不衰。开篇的这一句“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”更可谓耳熟能详，是不朽的经典名句。

《今日美国》（USA Today）在祝贺《傲慢与偏见》200岁生日快乐的同时，还做了一个专栏，讨论为什么这部小说200年来能够始终如一地得到读者爱戴的原因。USA Today列举了以下10个理由：

1. It’s the ultimate “happy ever after” tale. Pride & Prejudice established the template for an infinity of romance novels, yet no subsequent love story has ever come close to equaling the delights of the original. In P&P, opposites repel then attract: Mr. Darcy is sullen and arrogant. Elizabeth is vivacious and charming. He is rich, she is poor. He is madly in love, she can’t bear him. In a scene both hilarious and dramatic, Elizabeth squashes Mr. Darcy’s massive pride when she rejects his first proposal. To win her, Darcy is forced to change, to become more kind and polite. But Elizabeth also changes, though her journey from prejudice is less visible.

2.It’s fun. The plot of P&P scarcely seems to be the stuff of comedy. Here are five unmarried girls in rural England who will face poverty once their improvident father kicks the bucket since his estate must pass to a male heir. If they can’t snag husbands, their career options involve downwardly mobile humiliations such as working as governesses or paid companions to the wealthy. And yet the novel, brimming with sparkling dialogue, “is a pure joy to read,” as Anna Quindlen once put it. Perhaps it is Elizabeth’s father, Mr. Bennet, who best explains its appeal: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

3. It’s the rom-com of all rom-coms. Which is why P&P has been adapted for screens big and small around the world. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth have been portrayed by Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson (1940) and Matthew Macfadyen and the radiant Keira Knightley (2005). There is even a 2004 Bollywood musical, Bride and Prejudice. But for many fans, the ultimate adaptation is the 1995 BBC miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle. Her co-star Colin Firth may have won an Oscar playing a British monarch, but to Darcy fans, he is a god thanks to a certain scene involving a wet white shirt. These days, you can watch a Web adaptation on YouTube called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which stars Ashley Clements as Lizzie.

Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen are the most recent actors — but by no means the only ones — to embody Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy on the big screen, in 2005.(Photo: Alex Bailey, Focus Features, via AP)

4. Sex, lies and runaway teens. The next time someone dismisses Pride & Prejudice as a fussy old story about the breeding habits of early 19th-century Brits, point out that the novel’s villain, George Wickham, would probably be arrested today as a serial pedophile. An Army officer in his 20s, Wickham is a smooth operator who tries to seduce underage girls for fun and profit. Though he fails to lure Mr. Darcy’s 15-year-old heiress sister into marriage, Wickham succeeds in deflowering and shacking up with Elizabeth’s 16-year-old sister, Lydia, without benefit of clergy, thanks to her “animal spirits.”

5. P&P isn’t just “how to marry a millionaire, Regency style.” You can divide the world into two groups: mad romantics who adore those passionate Brontë tales about women yearning for tormented psychos like Heathcliff, and more pragmatic souls who admire Elizabeth Bennet’s decision to marry for love and money. Readers know that Austen, who never married, disapproves of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas’ decision to marry a “conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man” simply for money. Mr. Darcy, however, wouldn’t be Mr. Darcy without the ka-ching of 10,000 pounds a year and the big estate up north. Elizabeth herself jokes about her change of heart regarding Darcy: “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

6. Before the Kardashians, there were the Bennets. Reality TV didn’t invent miserable, weird families. Just look at Lizzie’s parents, the supremely ill-matched Ma and Pa Bennet. When not locked in his library reading, Mr. Bennet entertains himself by teasing and tormenting his whiny dimwit of a wife in front of their offspring. The deepest bond in the novel isn’t romantic love, it’s affection between siblings. (Austen adored her own sister Cassandra, who, in turn, encouraged Austen’s writing.) Even when Elizabeth dislikes Mr. Darcy, she admits he’s an outstanding brother to his little sister. And it’s sibling solidarity, not rivalry, with Elizabeth Bennet and her older sister, the head-turning beauty Jane. Indeed, it is a worried Elizabeth rushing to help Jane, fallen sick while dining with wealthy new neighbors, that captured the heart of British writer Martin Amis, who wrote: “Impelled by sibling love, Elizabeth strides off through the November mud to Netherfield, that fortress of fashion, privilege, and disdain. She arrives unannounced, and scandalously unaccompanied, ‘with weary ancles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.’ By now the male reader’s heart is secure (indeed, he is down on one knee).”

7. Back then, well-off people’s purpose really was to eat, drink and be merry. Name the one activity that Mr. Darcy, Bingley, Sir Lucas and Mr. Bennet all avoid: Work! They visit the ladies. Hunt birds. Attend balls. Ride horses. Travel. The one worker bee in the bunch — Elizabeth’s uncle Mr. Gardiner — is socially handicapped because of that icky thing called his job. Even military life appears to be a social club for swanky young studs — pretty remarkable since P&P was published at time when Napoleon was rampaging through Europe.

8. Now, as then, we choose to see what we want. First Impressions was Austen’s original title. Though far less catchy, it does convey perfectly Austen’s important message: First impressions are often wrong. For example, Darcy’s little sister is often mistaken for proud when she’s simply painfully shy. Other first impressions are dangerous. P&P‘s one truly evil character is the slick seducer Wickham, who charms everyone, even Elizabeth, who prides herself on being nobody’s fool.

9. Hypocrisy is always good for a laugh. Some of Austen’s funniest and sharpest scenes involve hypocrites. There’s Mr. Collins, the clergyman. Upon learning that his teenage cousin Lydia is living in sin, this man of God writes a letter to Mr. Bennet, noting that “the death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison” and closes by urging, “Let me then advise you, dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child from your affection forever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offense.” Nice. ​And while Mrs. Bennet embarrasses her family with her loud voice and silly ways, she’s Emily Post compared with the snobbish Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the novel’s rudest character.

10. Technology might change, but human nature remains the same. Give cellphones to the youngest Bennet daughters — the boy-crazy shopaholics Kitty and Lydia — and they would fit right in at any high school. Their father is every Baby Boomer dad ignoring both his upside-down mortgage and his out-of-control kids. The one homely Bennet female, Mary, is the 19th-century version of an insecure, overachieving nerd.

我也特别喜欢这篇专栏文章的最后一段总结。它能够代表很多P&P读者的心声：

In the end, although Austen crafted her characters with a quill pen dipped in ink, they have remained fresh, instantly recognizable and fascinating for 200 years. Whether people read P&P on a print page, a tablet or some future gadget, the love story of how Mr. Darcy won Elizabeth Bennet, will, no doubt, continue to captivate readers for another two centuries.

【书评转载】亚瑟的悲剧

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近两周来，小说《亚瑟的悲剧》（Tragedy of Arthur）的受关注度极高。以下是来自《纽约时报》的书评文章：

Fake Memoir With Bogus Shakespeare

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Author of Tragedy of Arthur

“The Tragedy of Arthur” is a novel about the discovery of what is reputed to be a lost Shakespeare play, and with it Arthur Phillips has found the perfect vehicle for his cerebral talents: his ingenuity; his bright, elastic prose; and, most notably, his penchant for pastiche — for pouring his copious literary gifts into old vessels and reinventing familiar genres.

Mr. Phillips’s earlier novels, of course, testified to these gifts, though they also tended to point up his reluctance to delve convincingly into the inner lives of his characters. His much talked-about first novel “Prague” — about young Americans in Europe — was filled with echoes of Nabokov and James. “The Egyptologist” worked variations on old Hollywood mummy movies and H. Rider Haggard stories. “Angelica” gussied up the Victorian ghost story with some postmodern pyrotechnics. And “The Song Is You” read like a mash-up of “Sleepless in Seattle” and a cheesy stalker movie.

With “The Tragedy of Arthur” Mr. Phillips has created a wonderfully tricky Chinese puzzle box of a novel that is as entertaining as it is brainy. If its characters are a little emotionally predictable, we don’t mind all that much: we’re more interested in seeing how the author cuts and sands his puzzle pieces, assembles them into a pretty contraption and then inserts lots of mirrors and false bottoms.

Mr. Phillips — who, in addition to writing, has been a child actor, a jazz musician and a five-time “Jeopardy!” champion — begins this complicated enterprise by cunningly creating a frame story to explain the finding of the lost Shakespeare play “The Tragedy of Arthur” in which, he, Arthur Phillips, author of four novels, is a central player.

In a lengthy fake memoir that is supposed to be the “Introduction” to this Shakespeare play, Mr. Phillips pretends to be a fictional version of himself, recounting the story of how his con-man father — who is also named Arthur and who is serving jail time for forgery — came to give him “a quarto edition, dated 1597” of the lost play and how that play came to be authenticated by assorted forensic and scholarly experts and published, here, in these pages, by Random House.

The narrator — that is, the fictional Arthur Phillips — has an intense love-hate relationship with his father. He feels his dad repeatedly abandoned him and his twin sister, Dana, during their childhood because he could not resist committing petty crimes that kept getting him sent to jail. At the same time young Arthur hungers after his absent father’s approval: he wants his Shakespeare-loving father to ratify his own creative efforts as a writer.

In recounting the tale of his fictional namesake Mr. Phillips does a clever job of orchestrating well-known Shakespearian themes, like the contingency of reason and love; the rift between appearance and reality; and twins and doubles and confused identities. He makes questions of legitimacy (which percolate through the history plays) and authenticity (which underlies Shakespeare authorship debates) central to this novel.

Mr. Phillips depicts the fictional Arthur’s father, Arthur Sr., as a phony and pretender — as a sort of combination of the con-man father in Geoffrey Wolff’s memoir “The Duke of Deception” and one of the charming, prodigal fathers in John le Carré’s fiction.

Arthur Sr. has served jail time for things like forging fake grocery store coupons and scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery. When his children were young, he even enlisted their help in creating phony crop circles as a prank. Why? “To astonish,” his son explains. “To add to the world’s store of precious possibility. To set the record crooked once and for all, so that someone’s life (some stranger’s) was not without wonder. It almost seems like a charitable act, if you subtract his ego.”

Given his father’s suspect history, why would the narrator believe for a second that “The Tragedy of Arthur” is the real thing? After all, the play is oddly filled with echoes of Phillips family history, including a dog with the same name as Arthur Sr.’s onetime pet.

Why would young Arthur lend his own reputation as a writer to another one of his father’s scams? The novel suggests hypotheses of widely varying plausibility: that for once in his life Arthur Sr. is telling the truth and has in fact stumbled across that rare and amazing thing — a new Shakespeare play, which he stole from the library of a wealthy man who didn’t know what he owned; that Arthur Sr. found a fake Shakespeare play and embellished it with some of his own imaginative embroiderings and then reprinted it on old paper with old ink; that young Arthur has himself written this phony play and pretended that his father gave it to him in order to inflate his father’s legend of shamelessness and manipulation.

How good a job does the real Mr. Phillips do of faking an early (and not very good) Shakespeare play? Well, let’s just say it’s hard to imagine that the fictional Arthur Phillips or the fictional Random House managed to find experts who would give the play their stamp of approval. The whole production feels truncated and rushed, and it’s filled with labored, lumpy poetry. On the other hand, we are supposed to suspect that “The Tragedy of Arthur” (or to be more precise, “The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain”) is a fake Shakespeare play written by a Shakespeare-loving con man. So its actual quality is sort of beside the point.

Not only does Mr. Phillips have a lot of fun concocting this play, borrowing a little from “Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,” “Henry V,” “Hamlet” and even “Macbeth” along the way, but also in writing “The Tragedy of Arthur” — the book we hold in our hands, not the play within it — he’s constructed a sly, spirited novel that deftly showcases his own versatility and shiny literary panache.

【书评转载】The Paris Wife

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以下书评文章转自《华盛顿邮报》：

Paula McLain’s ‘The Paris Wife’: A novel about Hemingway’s first wife

By Donna Rifkind （a writer in Los Angeles）

Paula McLain’s historical novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage has been climbing up the best-seller lists as steadily as reviewers have been dismissing it. The Los Angeles Times called the book “a Hallmark version” of Hemingway’s Paris years, hampered by “pedestrian writing and overpowering sentiment.” The New York Times concurred, calling Hemingway’s wife Hadley “a stodgy bore” and McLain’s prose cliche-ridden and plodding. So who’s right: enthusiastic book-buying audiences or unsympathetic critics?

Score one for the consumers. “The Paris Wife” is a richer and more provocative book than many reviewers have acknowledged. What they call cliches are simply conventions that all historical novels share, including Nancy Horan’s “Loving Frank,” the acclaimed best seller that McLain’s book superficially resembles. And “The Paris Wife” is a more ambitious effort than just a Hallmark version of Americans in Paris. It’s an imaginative homage to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, whose quiet support helped her young husband become a writer, and it gives readers a chance to see the person Hemingway aspired to be before fame turned him into something else.

Building her fictional but scrupulously true-to-life narration around many source materials, including two full-length biographies of Hadley as well as Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” McLain begins by dramatizing how damaged Ernest and Hadley were by the time they met in Chicago in 1920. Hadley’s father had killed himself in their St. Louis home when she was 13, a grim foreshadowing of Ernest’s father’s suicide and, decades later, Ernest’s own. She had also mourned the deaths of a beloved older sister and her mother.

Ernest, who had been seriously wounded in Italy during the Great War while a teenager, was suffering from the shaking nightmares and depression that today we call post-traumatic stress disorder and was then known as shell shock. This early brush with death had a profound influence on much of Hemingway’s future behavior and on all the fiction he wrote. McLain is right to underscore it, along with Hadley’s abundant sympathy for his suffering, with compassionate sensitivity.

Ernest and Hadley were down when they met, but they weren’t out. He was 21 and burning to be a writer. She was 28 and yearning to be a wife. They fell hard for each other. If the novel’s beginning sections stumble over a few expository bumps (Hadley: “What do you mean to do?” Ernest: “Make literary history, I guess.”), the narrative finds its flow a few months after the couple’s wedding, when they make their way to Paris. Hadley’s impressions of the city — dirty, war-shocked, tawdry and raw — stand out against Ernest’s instantaneous delight, though in time she came to appreciate “the oddity and the splendor.”

There was no doubt that here, on the cheap, Ernest was able to make Paris his informal university. Here he could learn from working-class Parisians as well as expatriate intellectuals, many of whom — notably Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein — served as mentors who helped him forge a blazingly new way to write fiction. He could study the Cezannes at the Musee du Luxembourg, figuring out how to translate the depths of their purity into language. And he could devote long, arduous hours to writing in cafes and garrets, knowing that Hadley, who hoped for his success as fervently as if it were her own, would be waiting for him soothingly at home.

Like all perfect setups, this one would not last. The tale of its ruin is familiar, but it gains freshness from Hadley’s point of view. With his first flush of literary notoriety, Ernest cast off his mentors, alienating them with a self-sabotaging viciousness that became a lifelong habit. At the same time, his social circle widened to include a recklessly modern new crowd, including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Duff Twysden — the model for Lady Brett Ashley in “The Sun Also Rises” — and Sara and Gerald Murphy. Their high-life bohemianism threatened Hadley, who was by now happily if squarely encumbered with a baby son. Then, in a still-sickening betrayal, Ernest engineered an exit from his marriage by conducting a prolonged, open affair with Hadley’s friend Pauline Pfeiffer, the perilously chic Vogue staffer who became the second of his four wives.

McLain writes about Hadley’s pain during the death throes of her marriage with a terrible delicacy, suitable for this modest, steadfast woman who was nobody’s fool. (It’s clear that the author knows plenty about abandonment: Her 2003 memoir, “Like Family,” is a scorchingly frank reminiscence of growing up in foster homes in the 1970s.) At a low point, when Ernest, Hadley and Pauline are vacationing together in southern France, Hadley takes note of their three bicycles on a rock path. “You could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants,” she says. Hemingway fans will not fail to remember the haunting image in his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” when death approaches “in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.”

Fame turned Hemingway into a self-crafted legend, an archetype and finally a parody. He was, as Joseph Epstein wrote in The Washington Post in 1970, “the first of the American writers we came to know too well.” Part of McLain’s accomplishment in this origin story is to make us look again at the Paris husband behind the Paris wife; not at the mythical swaggering Papa, but at the young, death-consumed writer who became a poet of death, who invented a new language to bring it to life, and whose brute emotional literary power will not be dismissed.

格林将出“最新”神秘小说

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说是格拉汉姆·格林（Graham Greene，1904-1991）的最新作品，是因为这是最近才被发掘出来的一部未完成的作品；又加个引号呢是因为这是格林先生很早以前的作品鸟。是的，就是这样。这部题为《空椅子》（The Empty Chair），讲述了一个有关凶杀的悬疑故事目前正在《海岸线》（The Strand）杂志上连载。杂志方目前正着手寻找合适的人选来把这个故事写完。格林先生早在1926年就开始撰写这部作品了。但是不知出于何种原因，他放弃了这部小说。当时22岁的格林刚刚皈依了罗马天主教，在《伦敦泰晤士报》处理有关案件的报道。这部手写的草稿是去年由德克萨斯大学的法国学者弗朗索瓦·加列克斯（François Gallix）在兰登中心（Ransom Center）的格林档案里找到的。

去年12月，《伦敦泰晤士报》刊载了这部作品的第一章作为一道文学知识测试题，要求读者猜出作者是谁。《空椅子》讲述的是一个发生在乡村别墅的神秘故事。《海岸线》的编辑安德鲁·古力（Andrew Gulli）表示，这部作品和盛名时期的格林作品不同，和处于创作力高峰期的格林作品不同。但是你还是可以看到格林的影子。

以刊载名家们未曾发表过的作品为特色的《海岸线》其实本身也是重现生机的杂志。它的前生是在1890-1950年间非常受欢迎的一本伦敦的著名杂志。目前它的总部设在密歇根州的伯明翰市。上一期，《海岸线》还发表了一篇最新发现的马克·吐温（Mark Twain）的短篇小说，以及一篇由P·G·沃德豪斯（P. G. Wodehouse）创作的、丢失已久的短篇小说。

【信息来源：纽约时报】