However, during Jane Austen’s life, only her family knew her authorship of those novels. Although publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a female’s entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. In addition, in her works, Jane Austen was often critical of the assumption and prejudices of upper-class. The style of her work was very relaxed and humorous and full of dramatic conflicts, which were very popular among readers. From the end of 18th century to the beginning of 19th century, the English literature was filled up with vulgar sentimental novels and gothic novels, but Jane Austen’s novels showed the daily life and country sight of English countryside middle class, which was not affected by the industrial revolution capitalism. Besides, her novels played a significant part in the history of literature, for she inherited and developed the excellent tradition of realism of the 18th century and prepared the climax of 19th realism novel.
Pride and Prejudice, the most popular novel by Jane Austen, first rejected by the publishers, was not published until 1813. It talks about trivial matters about love, marriage and family life among country squires and fairy ladies in British in the 18th century, which is the main topic of Jane Austen’s novels. It describes four pairs of love stories in Pride and Prejudice, especially Elizabeth and Darcy. Lydia seeks husband just for fun and vanity, while Charlotte pursuits love from her own reality, and pure feelings between each other is Jane’s standard to choose the lover. The special one is Elizabeth, intelligent, active, who bravely admits her pride and prejudice against Darcy after many twists and turns. Meanwhile, Darcy casts away traditional customs and secular prejudices to make two hearts together tightly. Because of its social value, the novel Pride and Prejudice has been studied by many people at home and abroad since it was published. Wang Xiaoqian in An Analysis of the Emotional Contradiction in Pride and Prejudice illustrates the emergence, development and transformation of the emotional contradiction, which makes the plots of emotions clearly take on the readers. Fu Rong in the periodical Irony in Pride and Prejudice and Its Rhetoric Effect describes the usage of irony in the description of characters to show that using irony quite often to inform the readers of her own personal opinions is one of Jane Austen’s writing styles, and also writes the satire of Collins and Elizabeth. Within the literature of the Enlightenment there are voices that called for the emancipation of women, and so began a still unfinished struggle for equality at home and in society. The writer Stevens D made a study about the women consciousness in pride and prejudice in the journal of Pride, prejudice, and pediatrics (women pediatricians in England before 1950).
There exists a serious hierarchy in Britain. The particularly complex and confusing class system is simply made up of the upper, middle and lower class. The wealthy families who run the City of London are at the core of British class and they pass on their wealth from generation to generation and enjoy a dominant position in society, which makes it different from the America or Chinese structure. The middle class can be pided into even smaller segments. Some people depend on the tight class structure of the British Empire for their position, but poorer than many people in supposedly lower class. The term “upper middle-class”might be used to describe doctors and lawyers who have relatively high incomes and high-status. There is another world “lower middle-class”for those whose job is unskilled office work or skilled well-paid manual work . Sometimes the word “lower middle-class” has connotations of hypocrisy and pretentiousness in Britain when they consider others as being so middle class. In Britain, with an inherit title such as baronets, barons and duck, the upper class have a lot of privileges. It is likely that they have a seat in the House of Lords and vote as inpiduals for serving their own interests, which is the reason why such a class-ridden society lasts for so long. 《傲慢与偏见》中爱情观的分析与比较(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_9515.html