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Originally Posted by NightBird
Ditto that.
Thanks for posting, xendula, but really the little I looked at was a mess, with hyphens thrown in randomly, after semicolons and colons, before and after quotation marks, a-piece, a-year. This would drive me nuts to try to read.
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Forgive me for pointing this out, but this is not an error, but the way Austen wrote it. Many words were hyphenated in her day which are not today (or "to-day" as Austen would have written), and she uses dashes frequently before and after quotation marks, and after commas and semicolons. If you read any edition of Austen which does not have this, you're not reading the original. Some editors do "modernise" the punctuation, but I prefer to stick with what the author wrote.
Eg, a couple of random samples from "Pride and Prejudice":
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"Do let us have a little music,"—cried Miss Bingley, tired of a conversation in which she had no share.—"Louisa, you will not mind my waking Mr. Hurst."
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His plan did not vary on seeing them.—Miss Bennet's lovely face confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of what was due to seniority; and for the first evening she was his settled choice. The next morning, however, made an alteration; for in a quarter of an hour's tête-à-tête with Mrs. Bennet before breakfast, a conversation beginning with his parsonage-house, and leading naturally to the avowal of his hopes, that a mistress might be found for it at Longbourn, produced from her, amid very complaisant smiles and general encouragement, a caution against the very Jane he had fixed on.—"As to her younger daughters she could not take upon her to say—she could not positively answer—but she did not know of any prepossession;—her eldest daughter, she must just mention—she felt it incumbent on her to hint, was likely to be very soon engaged."
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