“年过三十五岁”：简·奥斯汀的闺蜜故事 | 大西洋月刊

'On the Wrong Side of Five-and-Thirty': How Jane Austen Grew Up

Every year, I try to read a book by an author who was my age when the book was published. This year, that book was Sense and Sensibility. It’s not a perfect match: Jane Austen had not yet turned 36 (my age) when it was published in 1811. But given the occasion—this month marks the 200th anniversary of her death—I figured I’d cheat the rules this once.

每年，我都读一本书，该书出版时作者刚好是我这个年纪。今年我读了《理智与情感》，尽管有些不合拍，1811年出版时，简·奥斯汀还没到36岁。可本月恰好是她逝世200周年，借这个机会，我就坏一次规矩。

It turned out to be an appropriate choice. A principal trait of Colonel Brandon, one of the book’s main characters, is that he’s also viewing his 35th birthday in the rearview mirror, and the book contains no end of commentary about it. We’re introduced to Colonel Brandon through the perspective of Austen’s young heroine, Marianne Dashwood, and the character’s younger sister Margaret: “He was silent and grave. His appearance, however, was not unpleasing, in spite of his being in the opinion of Marianne and Margaret an absolute old bachelor, for he was on the wrong side of five-and-thirty.”

读完后我倒发现那是个合适的选择。书中的主人公布兰登上校，他事后回想自己的35岁生日，书中有大量叙述，这成了他的主要特点。我们通过奥斯汀笔下年轻的女主人公玛丽安·达什伍德和她的妹妹玛格丽特的视角认识了布兰登上校：“他话不多，很严肃。可他长得不丑，虽说在玛丽安和玛格丽特眼中，他绝对是个老光棍，因为他年过三十五岁了。”

The book is laced with wry little barbs about Brandon’s age, typically from Marianne’s point of view, written with tongue firmly in cheek: “[Marianne] was reasonable enough to allow that a man of five-and-thirty might well have outlived all acuteness of feeling and every exquisite power of enjoyment. She was perfectly disposed to make every allowance for the colonel’s advanced state of life which humanity required.”

书中不乏对布兰登年纪的戏谑，主要以玛丽安的口吻，可谓极尽挖苦：“【玛丽安】通情达理地认为，一个三十五岁的男人可能早已失去对情感的敏锐把握和对欢乐的细腻感受。她完全可以理解上校的老成持重，人到了那个年纪本该如此。”

The character of Marianne becomes a vehicle for comically wrongheaded ideas about when, exactly, one is required to give up hope for a fulfilling life. At the wise old age of 17, Marianne reconsiders “the desperation which had seized her at sixteen-and-a-half, of ever seeing a man who could satisfy her ideas of perfection.” 

玛丽安这个人物是一个载体，借以表达了一个滑稽而固执的想法，即人究竟何时应该放弃对圆满生活的希望。玛丽安大姑娘十七岁，重新掂量了自己“十六岁半时曾以为找到了十全十美的男人那种不顾一切的想法”。

But at 35, Brandon, in Marianne’s eyes, is well into his declining years. “If he were ever animated enough to be in love,” Marianne muses, he “must have long outlived every sensation of the kind.” She pities the aged colonel enough to reprove the meddling Mrs Jennings for poking fun at him:

可三十五岁的布兰登，在玛丽安眼里，正在走下坡路。“就算他曾轰轰烈烈，”玛丽安思忖着，他“想必早已麻木不仁了。”

“When is a man to be safe from such wit, if age and infirmity will not protect him?”

“一个年老体衰的男人，怎么会不被人打趣呢？”

“Infirmity!” said Elinor, “do you call Colonel Brandon infirm? I can easily suppose that his age may appear much greater to you than to my mother; but you can hardly deceive yourself as to his having the use of his limbs!”

“体衰！”埃利诺说，“你说布兰登上校体衰？我很理解，他的年纪在你看来，比我们母亲看来要大很多。但你总不能自欺欺人，毕竟他手脚还很灵便。”

“Did you not hear him complain of the rheumatism? and is not that the commonest infirmity of declining life?”

“你没听到他说有风湿病吗？这难道不是每况愈下的最常见表现吗？”

Marianne spends much of the book believing that the lives of the older people around her are frozen in place, their circumstances set sometime in their youth. Because, as several characters intimate, little but death can change a person’s marital circumstances after a wedding, and none of the main characters of the novel but the events of the book disabuse Marianne of this way of thinking. 

书中的玛丽安大多数时间都认为周围那些比她年纪大的人生活僵化，他们的人生境况在年轻时就定型了。正如书中几位人物的命运，除非配偶死亡，只要一结婚，婚姻就没法改变了。小说中没有哪个主要人物让玛丽安从这种想法中醒悟过来，可书中发生的事却让她明白自己错了。

She finds Colonel Brandon, to her surprise, fully “animated enough to be in love,” and comes to perceive marriage not as the end of a life, but as the beginning of one, with new attachments, new duties, and a new home. 

实际上，让她没想到的是，布兰登上校完全“可以轰轰烈烈”，她意识到婚姻不是生命的终点，而是新生的开端，有了新的归属、新的责任和新的家庭。

An even deeper transformation in the character emerges by the novel’s end: Marianne, who has spent the entire book fixated on finding a husband, utters her most heartfelt profession of love late in the novel, not to any man, but to her sister Elinor. While a concise account of Marianne’s marriage passes quickly, the novel dwells in its closing lines on the continued comity of the two sisters, and the lives they forge within sight of one another’s houses. In many ways, "Sense and Sensibility" isn’t the story of two women who find husbands—it’s the story of two sisters who discover one another. 

人物更深刻的转变发生在小说结尾：全书都在寻找丈夫的玛丽安在小说结束时由衷地发表了爱的宣言，却并非针对哪个男人，而是对她的姐姐埃利诺。小说对玛丽安婚姻生活的描述蜻蜓点水，最后的段落仍在讲述两姐妹的友谊，她们比邻而居，共同创造着生活。在许多方面，《理智与情感》并非两个女人找丈夫的故事，而是两个姐妹相互发现对方的故事。

It’s perilous to read Austen’s biography into the lives of her characters, yet it’s impossible to avoid the resonances. When she first drafted the text that would become Sense and Sensibility, Austen was a late teenager, around the age of her elder heroine, Elinor. But by the time the book was being readied for publication, Austen was almost exactly the age of Colonel Brandon. 

把奥斯汀的个人经历等同于人物的生活，这是危险的，可人们没法不产生联想。第一次起草《理智和情感》时，奥斯汀正好十七八岁，同姐姐埃利诺差不多年纪。可该书付梓出版时，奥斯汀正好是布兰登上校的年纪。

We don’t know exactly how the 30-something Jane Austen might have revised the writing of the teenage Jane Austen, but we do know that her own life was an effective rebuttal to the philosophy of the teenage Marianne Dashwood. 

我们不太清楚三十多岁的奥斯汀会如何修改简·奥斯汀少女时代的作品，但我们知道她自己的人生恰好对少女玛丽安·达什伍德的人生观做了有力的反驳。

Sense and Sensibility’s printing marked the beginning of Austen’s life as a published novelist. The extraordinary body of work that has inspired Austen’s readers over these past two centuries entered the public record in those six brief years that she lived “on the wrong side of five and thirty.” And like Elinor and Marianne, the relationship at the centre of Austen’s life was the one she had with her sister Cassandra, her closest friend, whose correspondence with her is the window through which we comprehend the author.

《理智与情感》的出版标志着奥斯汀在小说界崭露头角。过去两个多世纪中，奥斯汀不同凡响的作品一直激励着读者，而这些作品就在她“年过三十五岁”后的短短六年内问世。与埃利诺和玛丽安一样，奥斯汀生活中最核心的关系是同她的姐姐卡桑德拉，卡桑德拉是她最亲近的朋友，两人的通信使我们了解作者的窗口。

I wonder whether Austen, like Colonel Brandon, experienced her mid-30s as a new beginning. I wonder if, upon re-reading her early drafts of the book that would become Sense and Sensibility, she thought about how her younger self-imagined that age, and smiled at the bounty ahead of her. Above all, I wonder what she might have illuminated for us all—about love, about kinship, about growing older—if only we’d had more time with her.

我想知道奥斯汀是否同布兰登上校一样，在而立之年过半时有了全新的开始。我想知道她重读后来成为《理智与情感》的早期文本时，是否回想起自己当年是怎么看如今这个年纪的，是否会对命运的慷慨置之一笑。更重要的是，我想知道，如果活得更久些，她能给予我们什么启示，关于爱情、关于亲情、关于衰老。

观世界，学英文

《英文联播》新闻精读课程

精选、精读、精听、精译、精讲

两日一学 | 半年有成

入圈不分先后

课时存量开放

课程正在推送中

100次精讲+学习笔记+互动交流

回复“小密圈”试听

下载“小密圈”，扫描二维码

准备开始学习之旅