Not the “Best-Chosen” Punctuation, At Least by Contemporary Standards

Jane Austen’s Dashes, Semicolons, Hyphens, Commas, and Apostrophes

Punctuation and spelling rules were less settled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and using punctuation liberally in long, complex sentences with many clauses and phrases was not viewed as poor writing. Many passages in Jane Austen’s novels are over-punctuated by today’s standards.

Paired Dashes and Semicolons—Unnecessary and Ungrammatical

A few passages from Emma illustrate Austen’s ample use of dashes and semicolons:

 ¶ “Well,” said the still waiting Harriet;—“well—and—and what shall I do?” (683).

 ¶ “Oh! no;—and it is but a short letter too” (685).

(I am citing from Jane Austen, Emma, in Jane Austen: Complete and Unabridged [New York: Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2006], 659–914.)

As a copyeditor, I can’t see sentences like that without immediately wanting to prune them of their excess punctuation. There’s no need for a semicolon and a dash put together.

Quotation marks are really the only punctuation marks that should be nestled against other punctuation marks—a comma doesn’t belong next to a dash, an ellipsis doesn’t need to be preceded by a semicolon in most cases, etc. (Feel free to comment with exceptions!)

I would change the first sentence to this:

¶ “Well,” said the still-waiting Harriet, “well—and—and what shall I do?”

Notice that here I did add some punctuation—a hyphen to “still waiting” for clarity.

I ditched the semicolon-dash combination before the second part of Harriet’s question because not only does it seem cluttered to the modern eye but also it is ungrammatical.

As The Chicago Manual of Style explains, “In regular prose, a semicolon is most commonly used between two independent clauses not joined by a conjunction to signal a closer connection between them than a period would” (6.56). An independent clause contains a complete sentence that could stand alone. The initial “Well” in the quotation from Emma is not an independent clause. As “Well” is simply the opening interjection to the sentence, a comma instead of semicolon makes more sense.

There’s a similar semicolon issue near the end of Pride and Prejudice in Mr. Collins’s officious letter to Mr. Bennet congratulating him on Jane’s engagement: “Having thus offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another; of which we have been advertised by the same authority” (391). (Thanks to my sister for providing this example.)

That semicolon should really be a comma—as “of which we have been advertised by the same authority” could not stand on its own as a complete sentence.

Convention and Logic—Commas and Quotation Marks

Some semicolon excision—and comma excision—is also necessary in the second sentence from Emma, which I would transform to:

 ¶ “Oh no—and it is but a short letter too.”

CMOS says that “a comma usually follows an exclamatory oh or ah unless it is followed by an exclamation mark (or dash) or forms part of a phrase (e.g., ‘oh boy,’ ‘ah yes’)” (6.35).

A dash—not a semicolon—can join an exclamatory phrase like “Oh no” to the rest of the sentence.

Sometimes, Austen’s punctuation—or that of her printers and publishers—is illogical. 

Another passage from Emma says,

 ¶ “Do you think I had better say ‘No?’” (684).

Harriet is asking if she should say no, not if she should ask no. The question mark applies to her question to Emma, not to the no she is thinking about saying.

I would change the sentence to the following:

“Do you think I had better say no?”

Not only do my changes eliminate the error of the misplaced question mark but also they create a cleaner appearance to the sentence.

CMOS explains that “single-word speech” is usually “not enclosed in quotation marks except in direct discourse” (13.40): “She could not say no,” but “‘Yes,’ she said.” The reason to not include quotation marks is largely because of how it would look to do so:

To use CMOS’s example, “Ezra always answered yes; he could never say no to a friend” would be changed to the unwieldy “Ezra always answered, ‘Yes’; he could never say, ‘No’ to a friend.”

Punctuation rules follow an interesting mixture of grammar, logic, convention, and aesthetics.   

Aesthetics—Hyphens in Street Names

Some of my objections to Austen’s punctuation usage are purely aesthetic. Modern sensibilities prefer a cleaner look than sentences stuffed with commas, and while I greatly enjoy the many, many hours I have spent inhabiting the eighteenth-century worlds within Austen’s novels, I am a twenty-first century American, and a construction like “Pulteney-street”—how Austen punctuates the name in Northanger Abbey—isn’t one I’d use.

Hyphens are joiners, so there really isn’t a grammatical or logical reason not to say “Pulteney-street.” I can even see the logic behind lowercasing “street” since it’s a generic name.

While in Bath, England, in June, I was delighted to find that the street signs in Bath—carved onto the sides of the buildings made of the famous Bath stone—include hyphens, although the street names are in all caps. 

Jane Austen herself probably saw this sign for “Johnstone-street” during her residence in Bath in the early eighteenth century. (Photo taken by me!)

Jane Austen Is Still the Best English-Language Novelist

To be clear, a misplaced dash here and there takes nothing from Austen’s skill as a novelist. In fact, her printers, publishers, and editors are probably to blame for many of the punctation errors—to the extent that some are errors and not simply different aesthetic preferences from today’s. A huge part of a copyeditor’s work is deleting and inserting commas.

But the bottom line is, don’t use Austen as your authority on punctuation.

Read Austen to hear the English language used beautifully in refined, elegant discourse and description that insightfully discusses human nature and the human condition, but please pick up a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style or a comparable style manual if you’re ever unsure about how to punctuate a sentence.

Wishing I was back on “Pulteney-street” in Bath,

Rebekah Slonim

P.S. I promised to discuss apostrophes, but this issue is long enough already. Suffice it to say that Austen uses “her’s” for “hers” in many cases. I’d love to do more research at some point at the history of using “her’s” and when it became the convention to use “hers” instead.