Sentence structure

[Cecily]

I wondered if anyone would care to comment on these sentences: whether you think they are unclear, ungrammatical or both:


“I like the things that the people like among whom I’ve lived all my life."
“She was introduced to him only when with her husband she went to dine at his house.”
[he] “did not as usual when they were dining out give her a little smiling glance”


They were written by one person and checked and approved by at least one other before I saw them.

Is anyone brave enough to guess what sort of author and audience they are by and for etc?

[ellanovella]

I wondered if anyone would care to comment on these sentences: whether you think they are unclear, ungrammatical or both:


“I like the things that the people like among whom I’ve lived all my life."
“She was introduced to him only when with her husband she went to dine at his house.”
[he] “did not as usual when they were dining out give her a little smiling glance”


They were written by one person and checked and approved by at least one other before I saw them.

Is anyone brave enough to guess what sort of author and audience they are by and for etc?

i'm not sure what you're asking, but these sentences are very hard to understand

[Maeve]

i'm not sure what you're asking, but these sentences are very hard to understand

A German speaker writing English? Someone who has issues with prepositions?

[Cecily]

All three sentences are from the novel "The Painted Veil" by W Somerset Maugham, a very successful English writer around the 1930s, and still thought of as a good (though not great) writer. The book contains many other such sentences.

At the very least I'd add some punctuation to break up the phrases, but I think shuffling the word order is a more necessary change. They many not be ungrammatical, but if they're hard to understand, they are bad English.

I find it interesting that he wrote that way, and that his editor/publisher saw no need to change it.

As for Maeve's idea that maybe they were written by a German speaker, that's an interesting thought. French was his mother tongue (born in France and had a French nanny) and although he went to school in England, he then went to a German university.