Now that we’ve examined some of the individual words that best define Pride and Prejudice let’s try to identify the sentences with the most unique word choices.
To start we will look for sentences which are relatively unique. We calculate these by assigning each word a uniqueness score that reflects the frequency with which it showed up in Pride and Prejudice compared to our sample of modern writings. Ex: A word that was used 100 times more frequently than a modern author would gets a higher uniqueness score than a word only used 10 times more often.
Relatively Unique Sentence with Highest Total Word Rating
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.
Relatively Unique Sentence with Highest Average Word Rating
(I) who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust!
And then we switch away from relatively frequencies and instead assign every word a uniqueness score based entirely on how rare that word is in modern usage, no comparisons to the original book at all. This yields slightly different results:
Unique Sentence with Highest Total Word Rating Based on Modern Frequencies
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.
Unique Sentence with Highest Average Word Rating Based on Modern Frequencies
Brighton, and a whole campful of soldiers, to us, who have been overset already by one poor regiment of militia, and the monthly balls of Meryton!”
The highest total score sentence is the same for both metrics, largely because it is such an impressively large sentence with such a large collection of old fashioned words that it is hard to imagine a shorter sentence outranking it.
The average sentences are, however, different. The relative frequency sentence seems to do a better job of capturing the unique writing style of Jane Austin while the pure modern frequency analysis just seems to point out that no few recent books spend much time talking about Regency era British military. Which is true, but not particularly interesting.
