Beautiful Words

My reading was behind and I got home to read like a maniac and be able to catch up with the rest of the class. My father came in and asked me about the book. After telling him how stressed I was and how much I had to read I told him how difficult it is to perfectly understand Jane Austen’s writing and to prove my point and started reading out loud to him. To my surprise he said “How beautiful it sounds! I can’t keep up with what you are saying but it definitely sounds beautiful.” And I realized that it actually did.

Jane Austen’s words are beautiful. Leaving aside what the story is about and the romance’s and love’s beauty, the mare words are beautiful.

“The sanguine hope of good, however, which the benevolence of her heart suggested, had not yet deserted her(…)” (pg. 212)

Forget the meaning of what is being told, even though it is gorgeous too. Read each word out loud. Sanguine - sang-gwin and benevolence - buh-nev-uh-luh ns are two words that stand out to me. Both because of their pronunciation, and because I doubted their definition. If pronounced with British accent, like it’s meant to be, it sounds pleasant to the ears. The looks of the words are also beautiful, benevolence with four es in four syllables and sanguine with the ui. Their definitions are pleasant as well: Sanguine means cheerfully optimistic, hopeful and benevolence means an act of kindness, or the desire to do good to others. Hope, good and heart are also nice sounded words and have pretty definitions. And this is just a random half sentence I picked up! The structure of the sentence is beautifully done too. The sentence could be structured like this:

“The benevolence of her heart suggested her not to desert the sanguine hope of good (…)”

But it would not sound, or look as good. I appreciated then, thanks to my father’s comment, Austen’s effort and success at producing “her own darling child”.