The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice - "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" - pierces to the heart of Mrs Bennet's character as well as the very difficult social circumstances of her daughters on which the story is founded.
In English literature, the decline of the periodic sentence's popularity as identifiably grand style goes hand in hand with the development toward a less formal style, which some authors date to the beginning of the Romantic period, specifically the 1798 publication of the Lyrical Ballads, and the prevalence in twentieth-century literature of spoken language over written language.
"[9] Periodic sentences are rooted in the rhetorical techniques of Isocrates, who focused on a natural style that imitated how people speak.
According to William Harmon, the periodic sentence is used "to arouse interest and curiosity, to hold an idea in suspense before its final revelation.
"[10] In his Handbook to Literature, Harmon offers an early example in American literature found in Longfellow’s "Snowflakes":[5] Starting with a succession of parallel adverbial phrases ("Out of the bosom," "Out of the cloud-folds," "Over the woodlands," "Over the harvest-fields"), each followed by parallel modification ("of the air," "of her garment shaken," "brown and bare," "forsaken"), the sentence is left grammatically incomplete until the subject/verb group "Descends the snow".