A Perfect Wife_英语历史文化

埃伦·格拉斯哥 (1874-1945),美国女小说家。她以现实主义手法描写家乡弗吉尼亚州的生活，有地描绘了1850年以后的弗吉尼亚州的社会，共写成5部。第一部为《人民之声》（1900），最成功的一部是《弗吉尼亚》（1913）。1925年发表描写农村的长篇小说《不毛之地》，得到评论界的赞许，但时已年过半百。以后发表带有讽刺性的三部曲：《浪漫的喜剧演员》（1926）、《他们不惜干蠢事》（1929）和《温室中的生活》（1932）。最后一部常与《不毛之地》并列为她的最佳作品。一生未婚，但在她去世后发表的回忆录《女人的内心世界》（1954）中写出她曾与两个男人有过长期的爱情。1958年出版《书信集》。1963年出版《短篇小说选》。

 

after thirty years of married happiness, he could still remind himself that victoria was endowed with every charm except the thrilling touch of human frailty. though her perfection discouraged pleasures, especially the pleasures of love, he had learned in time to feel the pride of a husband in her natural frigidity. for he still clung, amid the decay of moral platitudes, to the discredited ideal of chivalry.

in his youth the world was suffused with the after-glow of the long victorian age, and a graceful feminine style had softened the manners, if not the natures, of men. at the end of that interesting epoch, when womanhood was exalted from a biological fact into a miraculous power, virginius littlepage, the younger son of an old and affluent family, had married victoria brooke, the grand-daughter of a tobacco planter, who had made a satisfactory fortune by forsaking his plantation and converting tobacco into cigarettes.

while virginius had been trained by stern tradition to respect every woman who had not stooped to folly, the virtue peculiar to her sex was among the least of his reasons for admiring victoria. she was not only modest, which was usual in the 課ineties, but she was beautiful, which is unusual in any decade. in the beginning of their acquaintance he had gone even further and ascribed intellect to her; but a few months of marriage had shown this to be merely one of the many delusions created by perfect features and noble expression.