Confusing sentence in an 1858 novel by George MacDonald
Solution 1:
ᴛʟᴅʀ Try reading it this way:
I noticed her dress but I wasn’t nearly as surprised as you might expect, given how strange she looked.
The author’s original is written in a style common to the way that English literature was very often written back then. Its 1858 publication plants it firmly in the Victorian era, a period that also gave Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a text that many today find challenging to read.
Literary English is different, and even more particularly, lyrical language is different. The language there is in a higher register than routinely found on scattered Post-It notes or Twitter’s tawdry tattles. It sustains sentences lovingly constructed by their authors over time; it is not spontaneous speech nor is meant to be taken for such. Read Dickens and Austen, read Dunsany and Melville; read Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith; read LeGuin and Tolkien. MacDonald, I think, will be much easier for you in comparison.
It may help you to break that sentence up:
I took notice of her dress,
although my surprise was by no means
of so overpowering a degree
as such an apparition
might naturally be expected to excite.
Discarding the lyrical to embrace the pedestrian, one might nonchalantly remark:
I noticed her dress but I wasn’t nearly as surprised as you might expect, given how strange she looked.
Before you understand the structure of that sentence, you don’t put the right stressed on the phrase in your mind, and so its grammar seems But once you do understand it, it can flow naturally off your tongue in a way that anyone would understand it. Phrasing is key here, and phrasing requires that you know which parts fit together, how.
I hope that now that you know what the sentence means through my simplistic and artless paraphrasal, that you can now reread the original. The version with my empty lines separating the sentence’s parts should help you see how it fits together syntactically.
I have now numbed myself to its complexity; whether by semantic satiety or inurement to pain, it now seems to me perfectly comprehensible as written even though when first I read it, it was even for me otherwise.