In a story titled "Prelude" written by "Katherine Mansfield" I came across the following sentence in this paragraph:
The fireplace was choked up with rubbish. She poked among it but found
nothing except a hair-tidy with a heart painted on it that had
belonged to the servant girl. Even that she left lying, and she
trailed through the narrow passage into the drawing-room.
After a little bit of investigation, I realized that "Even that she left lying" means "She left even that lying", with "that" referring to the "hair-tidy", meaning:
She left everything lying in the fireplace, even the hair-tidy.
The meaning of this sentence was very unclear to me at first . So my question is why the object of the verb has been moved to the beginning of sentence? What's been the purpose? to emphasize? to make the sentence more beautiful? Is this sort of
stuff only found in literature? Or is it something that I may face in daily conversations as well?
Best Answer
It’s an instance of fronting, in which the writer moves a clause element from its usual position. Here, the object is moved from the normal position after the verb to a position in front of it. The effect is to emphasise ‘even that’, by placing it first, as well as ‘left lying’ by leaving it last. The unmarked version, ‘She left even that lying’, would instead emphasise ‘she’, which for literary reasons the writer clearly did not wish to do.
Fronting is generally a feature of formal prose, but the fronting of objects is not unusual in conversation in sentences such as ‘That I couldn’t tell you.’