Sometimes it pays to zoom in. Today, we focus on some opening sentences which reward close attention. Our guest is Jenny Davidson — an English professor who’s also a novelist herself. She shows us how these carefully-crafted opening sentences can orient, intrigue or even mislead us.
Bonus clip
Click here to listen to Jenny discuss writing (and rewriting!) the opening sentences of her own novels.
Works mentioned
– Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
– Jane Austen, Emma
– Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
– W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
– George Eliot, Middlemarch
– Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Further reading
Jenny Davidson at Aeon – Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece?
Joe Fassler at The Atlantic – ‘This Did Something Powerful to Me’: Authors’ Favorite First Lines of Books
The Bulwer-Lytton contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels”
Andrew Heisel at Electric Literature – In Search of the Novel’s First Sentence: A Secret History
Elizabeth Stinson at Wired – Beautiful Literary Star Charts Map Famous First Sentences
Geoff Nunberg at NPR – The Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen’s ‘Truth Universally Acknowledged’