Publisher's Synopsis
It is a truth quite infrequently acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third of our material was not really there. Common prepositions, conjunctions, personal pronouns, and articles, and the verb-forms "was", "be", and "had", make up such a proportion of each of Jane Austen's novels. There is no doubt that a roughly similar proportion exists in the work of many other English novelists.;John Burrows shows that in the drawing of character in Jane Austen's writings very common words prove to be intrinsically revealing.
