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… [In ‘Pride and Prejudice’] Mr Collins’s repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia’s elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen’s point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence’s ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth.Mr Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation … The dashes in Mr Darcy’s letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. … The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy’s justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. … The letter’s totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event.

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