摘　要

简•奥斯汀（1775—1817）是十八世纪末十九世纪初英国文学史上一位杰出的女性作家，她创作了举世公认的英国第一批现实主义小说。她的作品是当时英国社会的缩影，真实地反映了英国社会的现实。毫无疑问，简•奥斯汀是英国文坛上的一颗闪亮的明珠，她的地位丝毫不逊于莎士比亚。
社会现状就是作家生活的写照。作家在展现一部作品时，他所表现的仅仅是一个时代的缩影，而我们则能看到这个时代是如何影响那一代人的。为了更好地鉴赏简•奥斯汀的作品，在本文中我将对奥斯汀的时代背景进行一些讨论。
    本文将从四个方面进行阐述。第一部分，当时的社会变革对简•奥斯汀写作造成的影响。工业革命，法国大革命，拿破仑战争等重大事件无一不对当时的英国社会和生活造成了巨大的影响。第二部分将着重阐述由此带来的阶级变化是如何影响简•奥斯汀的写作的，其中主要阐明上流社会和中间阶层的变化。第三部分，我将说明女性地位的变化带来的影响。最后，简•奥斯汀的生活经历也是影响其写作的因素之一。
   
关键词：简•奥斯汀；背景；作品；影响

Abstract

Jane Austen (1775-1871) was an outstanding female writer in the history of English literature, who created the first group of universally acknowledged English realistic novels in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Her works were a microcosm of the British society of her age, and truly revealed the British social realities. There is no doubt that Jane Austen was a dazzling pearl in the literary arena, and she has the equal status with Shakespeare.
The society a novelist lived in must mirror his or her mind or imagination. When the novelist painted a picture of the society in his or her novel, he or she saw it just as he or she sees a mirror, though the mirror we can see clearly how the society decided his or her mind and the environment . In order to appreciate Jane Austen’s works well, it is necessary that the social background of her age will be discussed in the following.
This paper is divided into four parts. The first section will represent how Social Background of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries affect Jane Austen’s works. In Jane Austen’s time, the English social background of Austen’s day, such events as Industrial Revolution, French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had a great impact on English society and life. The second section will focus on the influences of Class Evolvement on Jane Austen’s writing. In this section, we will pay attention to the changes of the upper class and the middle one. In the third part, it is about how changes of women’s social status impacts on Austen’s works. In the last section, I will introduce Jane Austen’s life to probe the relationship between her life and writing.

Key words: Jane Austen; background; work; influence