Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
*snip*
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.
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Thank you. It's a very helpful method to read the most works of James. But for the big 3, I don't know whether it works. The difficulty is not only in the complicated sentences, but also in the ambiguous meaning of many words. Maybe you can judge it when you begin to read them.