This title came to me as a question—or as a question so close to its answer that the question and its answer felt like the same thing, bound together in my eagerness to understand my motive for reading in the first place. Why has the act of reading unfailingly sustained me since a personal crisis in my teen years forced me out of the securities of my childhood? Reading had been a major part of my childhood as well, but as a recreation, a fun thing to do, something my teachers praised me for being “good at.” But it had not been an answer to a deeper need—I could almost say an “existential” need—till my teens.
I’ve read a ton of books since those long-ago teen years, and loved many sentences in them. But, as I claim in my title, one sentence stands out. (I wonder—and wish I could know—if you, the reader, have also asked this question of yourself. And, if so, what its answer—your favorite sentence—might be?)
Here’s my own choice (which, unsurprisingly, I know by heart):
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom does it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.
The sentence itself is found late in the book, in Chapter 13. As I typed it out just now, I realized that its full effect on me has depended on all the other wonderful sentences which preceded it. Especially on the book’s very first sentence, the one that sets in motion everything that comes after. That first sentence is:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a pleasant disposition, had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
The novel that both sentences are found in is, of course, Jane Austen’s Emma, maybe not the most loved of Austen’s works (Pride and Prejudice fills that spot, I believe), but the most perfect. Perfect in the sense that in Emma, Austen created just the right character, Emma, to weave her web of irony around.
Why is she the right character? The novel’s first sentence makes that clear. Emma is the right character because Emma herself believes that she herself is right—“right” as in correct, firmly placed in her world and in her opinions. Lacking in nothing, complete, and therefore invulnerable. A target for irony if there ever was one.
So that first sentence also contains language which forecasts the fall from perfection that is to come—language which culminates much later on in that favorite sentence of mine.
When I taught Emma in high school and college, I would spend an entire class on each of those sentences. I was always amazed at the difference between students’ reactions to the two of them a difference, I think, that reflected how much our close reading of Emma had taught them about irony.
Because students’ reaction to the novel’s first sentence tended to be tentative, I had to do a little prodding. I’d start out: “That first sentence—it certainly sounds like confident testimony to Emma’s own view of herself,” I would remark. “But does anything about the wording of it strike you as a little odd, a little off-center?” I might have to prod a bit more, “Well, what about those adjectives, ‘handsome, clever, and rich’? Would you be happy to be called those things?”
I can’t recall a time when someone didn’t break the puzzled silence with something like “Um, well, ‘handsome’ is OK, I guess, but she’s not really a beauty, right? And the same with ‘clever’ somehow… and ‘rich’ sounds kind of, I don’t know, crass?” Once I encouraged that first response, the other students would join in. What really used to get them, though, were the verbs at the sentence’s end: “…very little to distress or vex her,” especially Austen’s following “distress” with “vex.” As if the two were the same. “But they’re not, are they?” someone would say. “‘Distress’ is when something is really making life hard for you. But ‘vex’ is just—you know, you cut your fingernail or something.” I loved the laughter that would follow that comment. And then, in the brightest classes, someone would add, “So this Emma is twenty-one years old and she’s never had anything to complain about, not even a cut fingernail??” Cries of disgust and indignation. “What a spoiled brat!”
Once the ice was broken, I could let Austen herself take over. Every sentence thereafter, for most students, became a game of noticing just where Emma’s assumptions about herself and her world ended and reality began. That distance becomes over many pages so impossible to maintain that even Emma is forced at last to notice it, but not until Mr. Knightley comes to propose to her near the novel’s end. Her mistaking his purpose in coming, his mistaking her apparent unwillingness to hear his proposal, the eventual sorting-out of the feelings between them—these are the awkward elements of his proposal and her acceptance. As readers, we feel the awkwardnesses just as the characters do, but primarily from Emma’s point of view, because hers is the source of that awkwardness. She is the “one who sets herself up for Understanding,” as she confesses to Mr. Knightley, not he. Hers is the muddle, no one else’s. But no matter, or at least not much matter, for
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom does it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.
No problem now getting the class to talk. Right away the students began teasing out the repetition of “seldom.” Why is “Seldom, very seldom” so much better than just “Seldom” itself? Why is “complete” a key word that cannot be left out? Why doesn’t Austen end the sentence after “disclosure”? Why a semicolon? Why the repetition of “seldom” but not a doubling of it as before? What about Austen’s once again using “little” as she did at the end of the book’s first sentence: “very little to distress or vex her”? And then, why does Austen add a third element to the sentence, introduced by “but”?
I could sit and just listen to the questions flying back and forth. Yes, I might have to ask the class to pause in order to hear the narrator’s tone in that complex favorite sentence of mine. “Where have you heard that voice before, a voice speaking about a ‘case’ and about a result being ‘material?” Hands go up. “A law court!” “Yes, why?” “Well, because all along Emma has been on trial.” “Trial for what?” “For being so stuck up, for claiming to know more than she does or she can know.” “And the verdict?” “She’s guilty, and she knows it. But because Mr. Knightley loves her, she gets off pretty easy.” “Too easy?”
By the end of the book—there’s still some mopping up of the plot to do—the feeling is that Emma has truly learned her lesson and deserves happiness as much as anyone can. Because none of us—this is the best part of the class, when someone can say it spontaneously—is without guilt in claiming to know more than they can know. Who doesn’t have an Emma Woodhouse running around in their head? Lucky we are if someone knows that weakness about us and loves us anyway.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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