The exemplary sentence

Sentence Diagram

I’ve been reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, or rather skimming much of it. It’s long and rather overwritten, though Eliot can write!

It seems to me a book that would make a wonderful period movie. The plot involves many twists, including a lenghty and interesting perspective on how Jews were seen in 1800s. One focal point of the novel is the evolution of  a heedless, impoverished, but well-intentioned beauty who marries a cold, mean-spirited man named Grandcourt for his money and position.

This little sentence captures Grandcourt’s character perfectly:

It is true that Grandcourt went about with the sense that he did not care a languid curse for any one’s admiration, but this state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object—namely, a world of admiring or envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile…