Stretching the Reader's Breath.

My reading material this year is going back in time. First there was Dracula published in 1897, then Jane Eyre published in 1847, and now Frankenstein published in 1818.

What I’m finding particularly noteworthy is the fact that, the further back you go, the more apparent is the style for very long sentences containing a quantity of clauses which we would today consider insupportable. Interestingly, though, the worst writer I ever read for constructing sentences so long that they were verging on the unreadable was Joseph Conrad, and most of his major works were written in the early years of the 20^th century. In Conrad’s case, however, it should be borne in mind that his native language was not English, but Polish, which makes his ability to write as he did all the more remarkable.