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1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上你自己看一下，提取你认为要演讲的东西。读一遍对你有好处，等演讲完了别人问你问题也好回答。Jane Austen (1775-1817)English writer, who first gave the novel its modern character through the treatment of everyday life. Although Austen was widely read in her lifetime, she published her works anonymously. The most urgent preoccupation of
2、 her bright, young heroines is courtship and finally marriage. Austen herself never married. Her best-known books include PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813) and EMMA (1816). Virginia Woolf called Austen the most perfect artist among women.It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possessi
3、on of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (from Pride and Prejudice, 1813)Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen, was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The Austens did not lose a single one of their childr
4、en. Cassandra Leigh, Janes mother, fed her infants at the breast a few months, and then sent them to a wet nurse in a nearby village to be looked after for another year or longer.The first 25 years of her life Jane spent in Hampshire. On her fathers unexpected retirement, the family sold off everyth
5、ing, including Janes piano, and moved to Bath. Jane, aged twenty-five, and Cassandra, her elder sister, aged twenty-eight, were considered by contemporary standards confirmed old maid, and followed their parents.Jane Austen was mostly tutored at home, and irregularly at school, but she received a br
6、oader education than many women of her time. She started to write for family amusement as a child. Her parents were avid readers; Austens own favorite poet was Cowper. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. Very shy about her writing, she wrote on small pieces of paper that she slipped un
7、der the desk plotter if anyone came into the room. In her letters she observed the daily life of her family and friends in an intimate and gossipy manner: James danced with Alethea, and cut up the turkey last night with great perseverance. You say nothing of the silk stockings; I flatter myself, the
8、refore, that Charles has not purchased any, as I cannot very well afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian. (Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra in 1796)Austens father supported his daughters writing aspirations and tried to help her get a publishe
9、r. After his death in 1805, she lived with her sister and hypochondriac mother in Southampton and moved in 1809 to a large cottage in the village of Chawton. Austen never married, but her social life was active and she had suitors and romantic dreams. James Edward Austen-Leigh, her nephew, wanted to
10、 create another kind of legend around her and claimed that of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crises ever broke the smooth current of its course. There was in her nothing eccentric or angular; no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner. Austens sister Cassandra
11、 also never married. One of her brothers became a clergyman, two served in the navy, one was mentally retarded. He was taken care of a local family.Austen was well connected with the middling-rich landed gentry that she portrayed in her novels. In Chawton she started to write her major works, among
12、them SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters, Marianne and Elinor, who try to find proper husbands to secure their social position. The novel was written in 1797 as the revision of a sketch called Elinor and Marianne, composed when the author was 20. According to some s
13、ources, an earlier version of the work was written in the form of a novel in letters, and read aloud to the family as early as 1795.Austens heroines are determined to marry wisely and well, but romantic Marianne of Sense and Sensibility is a character, who feels intensely about everything and loses
14、her heart to an irresponsible seducer. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same with books, the same music must charm us both. Reasonable Elinor falls in love with a gentleman already engaged. I have frequen
15、tly detected myself in such kind of mistakes, said Elinor, in a total misapprehension of character in some point or another: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided
16、by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge. When Marianne likes to read and express her feelings, Elinor prefers to draw and design and be silent of his desires. They are the daughters of Henry Dashwood, whose son, John, from a former marriage. After his death, John inherits the Norland estate in Sussex, where the sisters live. Johns wi
