My Jane Austen Confession or Austen by the numbers

We all have our favorites; I confess nothing by saying this. You too must have your favorites among the six books, and I would hazard that you like Pride and Prejudice the most and Mansfield Park the least, especially if you read Jane Austen for pure enjoyment. If you’re a literary sort, you might move Mansfield Park higher, intrigued by how different it is from the other novels and appreciating Austen’s daring to create a somewhat unlikeable heroine.

I thought I might here list my favorite Austen books and favorite Austen stories and see whether I can analyze why these lists are slightly different and also promote a disused discussion group on Goodreads.com — Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict — that I’ve recently hijacked.

First, my favorite Austen books in order:

  1. Pride and Prejudice
  2. Persuasion
  3. Sense and Sensibility
  4. Emma
  5. Northanger Abbey
  6. Mansfield Park

Next, my favorite Austen stories:

  1. Pride and Prejudice
  2. Emma
  3. Sense and Sensibility (spots 2 and 3 are very close)
  4. Persuasion
  5. Mansfield Park
  6. Northanger Abbey

Admittedly these lists are subject to change, but spots one and two are probably fixed. I thought for today I would examine Emma and why it goes from Number Four to Number Two in these lists, using a mathematical approach.

Emma contains 876,635 characters, 160,993 words and 2,397 paragraphs*. On average, there are 67 words per paragraph. Pride and Prejudice contains 681,005 characters, 122,189 words and 2,118 paragraphs, for an average of 58 words per paragraph. Emma contains many page long paragraphs; in fact, there is a Frank Churchill letter that is a single paragraph that spans six pages in my edition! My confession here is that I that skip whole Miss Bates paragraphs.

To be further analytical, Emma has 3.4 sentences per paragraph with 21.5 words per sentence, compared to 3.0 sentences per parapraph and 2.03 words per sentence for Pride and Prejudice. So in general, Emma has longer chapters (55 chapters versus 61 for P&P), longer paragraphs, longer sentences and more words than Pride and Prejudice.

So as a favorite book, one I am eager to read again and again, Pride and Prejudice finds pride of place, being I think it Austen’s most tightly written book, and rather obviously most Austen fans agree. Emma falls to fourth place, however, because of Miss Bates, the long chapters, the long paragraphs, etc.

But the story of Emma I find unbelievably charming. She’s a breath of fresh air and I think appeals to older readers who recall the embarassing assumptions of youth as well as younger readers who still embrace those embarassing assumptions. I can imagine Emma again and again. When Miss Bates begins to speak, her audio fades and Emma can whisper an aside to Frank Churchill or Mrs. Weston to make Miss Bates comical and endurable, whereas in the book she is comical yet unendurable.

*Of course it’s silly to examine Jane Austen purely on word counts and paragraph lengths, but it can be instructive. For these statistics, I copied the text from the Project Gutenberg editions of the books and pasted the text into BBEdit for the Mac to derive the character and word count and used Microsoft Word’s readability statistics to determine the sentences per paragraph and words per sentence. Your mileage may vary. I included such things as volume and chapter headings but stripped blank paragraphs.

It’s also amusing to paste Austen into online readability calculators.

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