*snip*
Quote:
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I was also left feeling that what Henry James needed most was a good editor! Some of his sentences go on forever and are almost impossible to understand, even when I reread them. Here's one I noted, though earlier in the book, there were some that were even worse!
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Henry James dictated his later works - he experienced pain trying to write his works in longhand - perhaps developed carpal tunnel syndrome- he was a voracious letter writer. Dictation allowed him to construct these elaborate, long sentences that he would later edit on the typescript, adding punctuation to break them up a bit.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, following Rebecca West's suggestion, read these sentences out loud -- as conversation, rather than prose on the page.
Also, since James inserts many qualifying/descriptive clauses mid-sentence, you can read up to the first comma, jump to the end of the sentence (the part after the last punctuation mark) -- this gives you the main subject/idea of the sentence, and then go back and add the clauses.