elegancies

Real, long-standing regard brought the Westons and Mr. Knightley; and by Mr. Elton, a young man living alone without liking it, the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse’s drawing-room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter, was in no danger of being thrown away.

Perhaps it was not fair to expect him to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind.

“Aye, that may suit your humble ideas of yourself;—I know what a modest creature you are; but it will not satisfy your friends to have you taking up with any thing that may offer, any inferior, commonplace situation, in a family not moving in a certain circle, or able to command the elegancies of life.”

At least as surprising is the fact that the novel, so assured in its evocation of the minutiae of mid-century, middle-class America, so accurate in its reproduction of the cadences of American speech—from Lolita’s twanging teen slang to Charlotte Haze’s suburban book-club elegancies and Headmistress Pratt’s progressive-education claptrap—was written by a Russian émigré who had been in the country only a handful of years.

At least as surprising is the fact that the novel, so assured in its evocation of the minutiae of mid-century, middle-class America, so accurate in its reproduction of the cadences of American speech—from Lolita’s twanging teen slang to Charlotte Haze’s suburban book-club elegancies and Headmistress Pratt’s progressive-education claptrap—was written by a Russian émigré who had been in the country only a handful of years.