It was a dark and stormy night…
This opening line has been a literary “facepalm” since it first appeared in a overwrought Victorian novel by Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton. It has become synonymous with the Victorian melodramatic style, and the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, begun in 1982 as an homage to this most famous of opening lines, requires contestants “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.”