Emma, the view from Donwell Abbey

This view belongs to the strawberry party at Donwell Abbey, the estate of Mr. Knightley. The phrase English verdure, English culture, English comfort is one of the most quoted lines in the novel. Austen wrote Emma between January 1814 and March 1815 at Chawton in Hampshire. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromAusten almost never describes scenery. Her novels are built from conversation and from what people notice about each other, so a passage that stops to look at a landscape is unusual enough to be worth flagging, and this is the most quoted one she wrote. It happens during the strawberry party at Donwell Abbey, where the party has walked out to look at the view and briefly stopped talking. The Gutenberg text linked below keeps her punctuation, including a long dash used inside a phrase rather than between two.

What you might not noticeThe line repeats the word English three times in eight words, verdure, culture and comfort, and Austen sets it directly after a long dash rather than after a full stop, so the repetition arrives as a single breath. Source

What it trainsThree sentences in 340 characters means an average of nineteen words, and the passage reads as a series of small arrivals rather than a flow. Eleven capitals, eight of them inside sentences, and two of those are the repeated word English. The trap is a long dash sitting inside a phrase with no spaces around it, so view and sweet run together across it as one unbroken string. Getting that right means reaching for the plain hyphen beside your zero key, which is what the long dash becomes here, and it is the only mark of its kind in the passage.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg