Persuasion, the walk down to the sea at Lyme

Persuasion was published in 1818 together with Northanger Abbey, and its seaside chapters made the Cobb at Lyme a place visitors still ask for by name. Austen had stayed in Lyme Regis in 1804 and used the town, its Cobb and its cliffs in this part of the book. The whole novel is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromThis is transitional prose, the kind readers skim without noticing and typists cannot. Its job is to get a party of people from an inn to the shore and to make the interval feel handled rather than skipped, so Austen names only the two arrangements that would actually have to be made first and moves on. Sentences like this are the connective tissue of every nineteenth-century novel and they almost never get quoted, which makes copying one an unusual way of noticing how the machinery works.

What you might not noticeThe passage does its work in two sentences and forty-eight words, without naming a single character. Austen moves the whole party by describing only what has to be arranged first, the rooms and the dinner. Source

What it trainsAt 260 characters this is one of the shorter prose passages here, and it puts two fourteen-letter words into a single sentence: accommodations and unquestionably. Neither is the longest word on the shelf, since four passages here carry unbroken words of fifteen letters, but two of this size in one short sentence is unusual. They stand seventeen words apart, one just after the opening and one just before the sentence turns, so the second arrives when the hand has already settled. Both are built from familiar stems that change shape halfway through, which is where fingers guess. Everything else is plain: four commas, three capitals, two full stops and no hyphens at all.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg