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dence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book must "go one better" than "Une Vie," and that to this end it must be the life-history of two women instead of only one. Hence, "The Old Wives' Tale" has two heroines. Constance was the original; Sophia was created out of bravado, just to indicate that I declined to consider Guy de Maupassant as the last forerunner of the deluge. I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I had sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely in the face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of smaller scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not dally forever, and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write it, in a village near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house from a retired railway servant. I calculated that it would be 200,000 words long (which it exactly proved to be), and I had a vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except Richardson's) had ever been written before. So I counted the words in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece. I wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly easy to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life, I had lived in the actual draper's shop of the Baines's, and knew it as only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a visit. I tried to continue the book in a London hotel, but London was too distracting, and I put the thing away, and during January and February of 1908, I wrote "Buried Alive," which was published immediately, and was received with majestic indifference by the English public, an indifference which has persisted to this day 去书内
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  • Lesley Lesley

    过了几个星期，我又确定了一个问题，那就是，我的书必须比《Une Vie》“好一点”，为此，它必须是两个女人的生活史，而不是一个女人的。因此，《老妇人的故事》有两个女主角。康斯坦斯是最初的;索菲亚的创造是出于虚张声势，只是为了表明我不认为莫泊桑是洪水的最后先驱。我被我的计划的大胆吓倒了，但我发誓要完成它。有几年的时间，我不时地正视它，然后走开去写小范围的小说，我写了五、六部。但我不能一直这样消磨下去。1907年秋天，我在枫丹白露附近的一个村子里，从一个退休的铁路仆人那里租了半间房子，开始了写作。我估计这本书将有20万字长(事实证明确实如此)，而且我有一个模糊的概念，这样规模的小说(除了理查森的)以前从来没有人写过。于是，我数了数维多利亚时代几部著名小说的字数，令我欣慰的是，这些著名的维多利亚时代小说平均每部有40万字。我在六周内写完了小说的第一部分。这对我来说相当容易，因为在七十年代，也就是我人生的头十年里，我曾住在贝恩家真正的布店里，对它只有孩子才知道。然后我去了伦敦。我试着在伦敦的一家旅馆里继续写这本书，但伦敦太让人分心了，我把那本书收起来，在1908年1月和2月间，我写了《活埋》，立刻出版了，英国公众对这本书不屑一顾，这种冷漠一直持续到今天。

    2023-02-06 喜欢(0) 回复(0)