Do you have an example of her writing moving into iambic pentameter in prose, please?

I googled for examples from her books but — search results are terrible.

Of course! This is my favourite example, from Sense and Sensibility, because it announces itself with "burst", and that's the novel where she deploys it most:

"Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease."

She 'tends towards Iambic' in literary criticism terminology. So it's not a strict Iambic, more like a 'soft Iambic' which is a term I can't remember if it's actually used in lit crit, or if I made it up.

You need to drop the "at" syllable, in that example (which you would do in vocal rhythms of English, then and now), for it to be a true Iambic.

There's lots of good writing on the King James Bible "tending towards" Iambic, which should be more Google-able, and her father was a preacher, so that's a likely influence there, I would speculate.

Some others I like that I remember:

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." - Persuasion (I think?).

"Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.

There are much longer examples - whole paragraphs that close chapters of Sense and Sensibility specifically. I'll try and find the version I have notations on when I'm next around my books. She regularly slips into it to close moments of emotional crescendo - "Cursus" being the Latin term for an analogous technique, when it was more frequently used in a more stylised manner.

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constantius 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

One of those comments that let you glimpse the depth behind things and the joys that lie in exploring those depths.

Thanks for taking the time. I will spend tomorrow evening reading.

	▲	gabriel666smith 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		What a nice thing to say, thank you. A pleasure to be even a vague signpost toward work that's so rewarding. Enjoy your evening(s)!

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FreakLegion 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.

"Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning according to the writer's idiosyncrasies.

And individual writers can be very idiosyncratic here. Shakespeare, for example, if I remember right, lets monosyllabic words occur in almost any position. Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned. And so on.

The field has probably evolved since I was last part of it, but I'll still recommend Kristin Hanson's work in this area: https://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf. (Actually the second time I've recommended Hanson on HN. The last time was, let's see, 6 years ago!)

	▲	gabriel666smith 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		+1! Hanson is one of the gold-standards on this. It is idiosyncratic, you're right - to the speaker / reader as much as the writer (is my contention with their work). Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing. I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed. This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!

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vintagedave 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thankyou. Scanning those phrases, I am trying to read the cadence and understand this -- this is very much a comment to return to and ponder. Thankyou very much for answering my question, too.