【单选题】

In 1990, WilliamDeresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D、inEnglish literature atColumbia University.Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly selfeffacing new book,

A、JaneAustenEducation,Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just JaneAusten but the entire gang of 19th-centuryBritish novelists ~ Hardy,Dickens,Eliot ... the lot.
At 26,Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone. " WhatDeresiewicz was going through was the rebel phase in whichDostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate.
Sardonic students do not, asDeresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals.EmmaBovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest;Emma Woodhouse left him colD、"Her life," he lamented, "was impossibly narrow. " Her story, such as it was, "seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. " Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous MissBates -weren’t these just the sort of boresDeresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury.
The state of outraged hostility is, of course, a setup. Many ofDeresiewicz’s readers will already know him as the author of the widely admired JaneAusten and the Romantic Poets. One of the novelist’s most appreciative critics isn’t about to knockAusten off her plinth. Nevertheless, a profound truth lies embedded inDeresiewicz’s witty account of his early animosity. He applies that comic narrative device to her six completed novels.Considered so, each work reveals itself as a teaching tool in the painful journey toward becoming not only adult but useful.
The truth is that young readers don’t easily attach themselves toAusten. Mr.Darcy, "haughty as a Siamese cat," isn’t half as appealing on the page asColin Firth stalking across the screen inAndrewDavies’s liberty-taking film. Seventeen-year-oldCatherine Morland seems coltish and naive to readers of her own age today, whileEmma Woodhouse, all of 20, appears loud, vain and bossy.And who, at 27 or thereabouts, now feels sympathy for the meekness ofAnneElliot, a young woman who has allowed a monstrous father and a persuasive family friend to ruin her chances of happiness with the engagingCaptain Wentworth
Deresiewicz’s emphasis onAusten’s lack of appeal to young readers struck a chorD、The memory still lingers of being taken to lunch by my father to meet a cultured man who might, it must have been hoped, exert a civilizing influence on a willful 20-year-olD、We’d barely started on the appetizers before JaneAusten’s name came up. "I hate her," I announced, brandishing my scorn as a badge of pride. Invited to offer reasons, I prattled on, much likeDeresiewicz’s younger self, about her dreary characters: all so banal, so unimportant. Glancing up for admiration, I caught an odd expression on our guest’s face, something between amusement and disgust. I carried fight on. It was another five years before I comprehended the shameless depths of my arrogance. I had matchedEmma -at her worst.
It happens thatEmma at her worst is the turning point inDeresiewicz’s account of his own conversion. The fictional scene that taught him to understand the subtlety ofAusten’s manipulation of the reader was the picnic at whichEmma, cocksure as ever, orders gentle MissBates to restrict her utterance of platitudes during the meal. MissBates blushes