You are looking for "litotes" (my mnemonic, perhaps not technically quite 
accurate, way of recalling this is "Negation of the opposite")--Hawthorne 
and Austen use them frequently, of those authors I teach regularly.


At 12:08 PM 06/21/2005, you wrote:
>Hello All,
>Hope you're enjoying a wonderful summer.  A friend
>asked me for the name of a negative like Jane Austen
>uses:  "It was not impossible" versus "It was
>possible."
>Thank you,
>Mary Murray
>
>
>
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