From a lang-8 post I was proofreading:
A long time ago, there lived a little girl. … [some things happen: the girl meets a travelling priest etc.] … The wisdom of his words changed the girl forever. Since then, when someone asked about her father, she said with a smile, "I am a child of Luck". She had grown up, and it was said that she became a barmaid, kind and generous. One rainy night, a young man clothed in rags came into her tavern.
I changed the bolded phrase to grew up, but could it be that the Past Perfect is possible here? If the PP is erroneous here, it's hard for me to come up with a nice explanation why.
What could be the main obstacle to using the PP in this sentence? The conjunction and?
Maybe "it was said" is too diffuse in duration too? I also guess that "it was said" occured after she became a barmaid, this complicates the picture.
What if we delete "it was said":
She had grown up and became a barmaid, kind and generous.
Would this be okay?
Best Answer
It is perfectly natural to use the past perfect in she had grown up. The past perfect summarizes all that came before in her life, even if this was a process, up to the moment in time that the narrator utters those four words.
What is awkward is to link "she had grown up" with verbs that are not in the past perfect. Thus, both
and
do not link with precision the clause she had grown up with the actions of the rest of the sentence. The second version is especially jarring. I can hear an almost audible clank when I read that sentence. To take full advantage of the conjoining nature of and, both actions will be cast in the past perfect:
The first sentence is not as bad, probably because the intervening narrative and it was said that (or even the active and people said) connects she became a barmaid in some nebulous time relationship to she had grown up. The only thing we know about when the entirety of and it was said that she became a barmaid is that it is after the moment expressed by she had grown up. But years, decades could have transpired in between. Thus, unless one enjoys living in such a nebula, even the first sentence can be tightened by using the past perfect: and it was said that she had become.