Sentence No. 71 · 6 June 2026
For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway (1925) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The sentence opens with "For so it had always seemed to her" — a framing clause that means the main statement comes *first*, and everything from "when" onward is a long embedded flashback. Whenever a sentence leads with its verdict like this, the explanatory detail trails behind.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Clarissa Dalloway steps out to buy flowers, and a rush of memory overtakes her. 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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