Sentence No. 47 · 13 May 2026
You pierce my soul; I am half agony, half hope.
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Jane Austen — Persuasion (1817) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The semicolon joins two independent clauses, and the second runs on strict parallelism: "half agony, half hope." Paired units like these belong together as one phrase — "half agony" and "half hope" cannot be split apart.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 5 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Captain Wentworth has written Anne Elliot a letter — one of the most celebrated love letters in English fiction. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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