简爱
简爱Jane Eyre is a first-person narrative of the title character, a small, plain-faced, intelligent and honest English orphan. The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead, where she is abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations; her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her time with the Rivers family at Marsh's End (or Moor House) and Morton, where her cold clergyman-cousin St John Rivers proposes to her; and her reunion with and marriage to her beloved Rochester at his house of Ferndean. Partly autobiographical, the novel abounds with social criticism and sinister gothic elements.
Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was a British novelist, the eldest of the three famous Brontë sisters whose novels have become standards of English literature. Charlotte Brontë, who used the pen name Currer Bell, is best known for Jane Eyre, one of the most famous English novels.
Emily Jane Brontë was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly-knit, English provincial family. Born in 1818, she shared the parsonage of the town of Haworth, Yorkshire, with her older sister, Charlotte, her brother, Branwell, her younger sister, Anne, and her father, The Reverend Patrick Brontë. All five were poets and writers; all but Branwell would publish at least one book.
Fantasy was the Brontë children’s one relief from the rigors of religion and the bleakness of life in an impoverished region. They invented a series of imaginary kingdoms and constructed a whole library of journals, stories, poems, and plays around their inhabitants. Emily’s special province was a kingdom she called Gondal, whose romantic heroes and exiles owed much to the poems of Byron.
Brief stays at several boarding schools were the sum of her experiences outside Haworth until 1842, when she entered a school in Brussels with her sister Charlotte. After a year of study and teaching there, they felt qualified to announce the opening of a school in their own home, but could not attract a single pupil.
In 1845 Charlotte Brontë came across a manuscript volume of her sister’s poems. She knew at once, she later wrote, that they were “not at all like poetry women generally write…they had a peculiar music–wild, melancholy, and elevating.” At her sister’s urging, Emily’s poems, along with Anne’s and Charlotte’s, were published pseudonymously in 1846. An almost complete silence greeted this volume, but the three sisters, buoyed by the fact of publication, immediately began to write novels. Emily’s effort was Wuthering Heights; appearing in 1847 it was treated at first as a lesser work by Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre had already been published to great acclaim. Emily Brontë’s name did not emerge from behind her pseudonym of Ellis Bell until the second edition of her novel appeared in 1850.
In the meantime, tragedy had struck the Brontë family. In September of 1848 Branwell had succumbed to a life of dissipation. By December, after a brief illness, Emily too was dead; her sister Anne would die the next year. Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel, was just beginning to be understood as the wild and singular work of genius that it is. “Stronger than a man,” wrote Charlotte, “Simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”
"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am souless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor evern of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that adresses your spirit; just as if both has passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"
参考译文
“我告诉你我非走不可！”我回驳着，感情很有些冲动。“你难道认为，我会留下来甘愿做一个对你来说无足轻重的人？你以为我是一架机器——一架没有感情的机器？能够容忍别人把一口面包从我嘴里抢走，把一滴生命之水从我杯子里泼掉？难道就因为我一贫如洗、默默无闻、长相平庸、个子瘦小，就没有灵魂和心肠了？你想错了！我的心灵跟你一样丰富，我的心胸跟你一样充实！要是上帝赐予我一点姿色和财富，我会使你难以离开我，就像现在我很难离开你一样。我不是根据习俗、常规，甚至也不是血肉之躯同你说话，而是我的灵魂同你的灵魂在对话，就仿佛我们两人穿过坟墓，站在上帝脚下，彼此平等，本来就如此！”
《简爱》(英文版)是英国19世纪最出色的小说之一。人们普遍认为《简爱》(英文版)是夏洛蒂·勃朗特”诗意的生平”的写照，是一部具有自传色彩的作品。小说一出现就在文坛引起了轰动，英国著名讽刺小说家萨克雷曾动情地说：“《简爱》(英文版)使我非常感动，我非常喜爱它。它是我能花好多天来读的第一部英国小说。”《简爱》(英文版)之所以能够打动人心，并非以情节取胜，在作者对人性的描述中，我们隐约看到了自身卑劣或美丽的人性。在问世之后的一个半世纪的今天，《简爱》(英文版)仍在世界各种语言中拥有众多的读者，根据这部小说改编的电影亦荣获奥斯卡金像奖。
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