Emma, the village of Highbury

Emma, the last novel Austen saw published, came out in December 1815. Highbury is invented, but the book places it in Surrey, sixteen miles from London. The title page carries the year 1816. She told her family she had chosen a heroine whom nobody but herself would much like. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromThis is a map disguised as a sentence. Austen has to establish where everyone lives before the plot can move, and rather than write a paragraph of geography she suspends one clause inside another until Hartfield, Highbury and the relationship between them are all in place. The construction is the reason the passage is quoted in grammar books as often as in criticism. The edition linked below is the Gutenberg text of the novel, which follows the original setting rather than a modernized reprint.

What you might not noticeHighbury is called a large and populous village, almost amounting to a town, and Austen never lets it become one. The distinction matters to the plot, because a town would have had society that did not depend on Emma. Source

What it trainsTen commas in 428 characters, and unlike a list they are not separating items but nesting clauses inside one another. That is harder to copy than it looks, because you cannot predict where the sentence is going and the eye has nothing to anchor on. Four sentences average nearly nineteen words. Three words reach eleven letters, acquaintance, universally and shrubberies, and the last of those is the kind of word people type by rhythm rather than by letter and consistently get wrong in the middle.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg