George Eliot’s opening sentence in Adam Bede 

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With her pastoral novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot portrays impressionistic images of daily life in a quiet rural community—both people’s circumstances and their environment: unfulfilled love and selfishness.

To deal with such vast ambitious rural canvas, Eliot used the following opening sentence:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for your, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

Following our two principles we discussed above, we note that the sentence opens with a prepositional phrase: ‘With a single drop of ink for a mirror,’ In the third sentence, again, we see that she repeats the sentence pattern with the same prepositional phrase. Not only do we have in this opening a fine pairing of language and topical idea, but also the promise of magical writing filled with visions of village life.

To make our discussion clearer, let’s recall that a prepositional phrase will begin with a preposition and end with a noun, pronoun, gerund, or clause—called the “object” of the preposition. Thus, the prepositional phrase opens with the preposition ‘with’ and ends with the noun ‘mirror,’ which is the object of the preposition. The entire prepositional phrase is being used as an adverb; in that, it answers the questions ‘how’ will the Egyptian sorcerer will conjure up his visions, and, or how the narrator will tell his story: “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen.”

In sum, the prepositional phrase —as written by a master writer as George Eliot— is powerful enough to open not only the sentence and the paragraph, but also the novel itself!

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