Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
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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Yep. I remember an episode of the show "Connections" with James Burke where he made mention of how things have changed over the centuries. At one time not only were words that are no longer hyphenated given that hyphenation but not many generations before that they would abbreviate everything. Our modern way of writing out a complete sentence would have seemed rather backward to them.