the portrait of a lady by Henry James

Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the book:


"The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edard VI, had offered a night's hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell's wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances - which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork - were of the right measure."

Now if you read through that entire thing, you may have noticed that it only contains one period (along with 2 sets of parenthesis, 2 semi-colons, 2 colons, 16 commas and 2 hyphens). It is the longest sentence that I have every read!

Just thought I'd share. Needless to say, or maybe I do need to say, that I did not read beyond that. And it was a feat to get that far.