Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice is pretty much the golden standard for what defines an enjoyable romance. An intelligent, beautiful and well-off woman meets an intelligent, handsome and ridiculously rich man. They get off on the wrong foot, slowly come to appreciate each other’s bold personalities, get distracted by some scandals and finally have their happily ever after.
Not a fan of mushy Hallmark love stories? No problem! Pride and Prejudice also doubles as a snarky satire about all things romantic. Sure, the main characters eventually get their fairy tail ending but along the way Austin takes every opportunity to poke fun at romance, passion, youth, marriage and the silly antics of people engaged in climbing the social ladder through endless parties and favorable unions. The book even starts with the rather sarcastic observation that:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Now on to the numbers:
Average Word Size: 4.38 letters
Median Word Size: 4 letters
Longest Word: disinterestedness (17 letters)
Sentence Count: 5960
Average Sentence Length: 20.62 words
Median Sentence Length: 16 words
Longest Sentence: 180 words long
Every lingering struggle in his favour grew fainter and fainter; and in farther justification of Mr. Darcy, she could not but allow that Mr. Bingley, when questioned by Jane, had long ago asserted his blamelessness in the affair; that proud and repulsive as were his manners, she had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance—an acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways—seen anything that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—anything that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits; that among his own connections he was esteemed and valued—that even Wickham had allowed him merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some amiable feeling; that had his actions been what Mr. Wickham represented them, so gross a violation of everything right could hardly have been concealed from the world; and that friendship between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr. Bingley, was incomprehensible.
One thing I noticed about this book was that Jane Austin took a very flexible approach to sentence structure. Sure, most of her sentences following the traditional subject, verb, object pattern but when she really got going she had no qualms about mashing multiple sentence fragments together, tossing in some semi colons or dashes to glue them together and then calling it good regardless of whether it technically fit the official definition of a proper compound sentence.
Which is fine. Grammar is honestly more of a suggestion than a rule, especially in works of fiction, and we as human readers have no problem keeping track of the meaning of these run on sentences.
Our poor computers, on the other hand, are not nearly so adept at parsing out the structure, much less the meanings, of this sort of sentence. Perhaps one day…
