<p>Lily Dale, the heroine of Anthony Trollope’s serialized novel The Small House at Allington, captivated readers to where they deluged the author with letters pleading that he have her marry her admirer, Johnny Eames.</p>
<p>(A) captivated readers to where
(B) so captivated readers that
(C) because she captivated readers,
(D) who captivated readers so that
(E) she was so captivating to readers that</p>
<p>I don’t see any obvious grammar rule or explanation to apply here in order to narrow the choices below 2. I won’t say the answer right away because people tend to give unintelligent responses when they already know what it is.</p>
<p>Anyways, someone please explain :)</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure the answer is B. The other choices don’t make sense to me. :/</p>
<p>You can definitely eliminate choices C, D, and E. Just by plugging them in, you can see that they won’t fit into the sentence.</p>
<p>Another thing: “the heroine of Anthony Trollope’s serialized novel The Small House at Allington” is an appositive, so you can pretty much ignore that part of the sentence as if it wasn’t there.</p>
<p>Agreed, the answer is B. As previously stated, C, D, and E simply do not work when plugged in to the sentence. The “to where” in A just bugs me; it doesn’t sound good as good as choice B.</p>
<p>Thanks for trying to help, but I ended up finding CollegeBoard’s explanation after some searching. I already knew that C, D, and E were obviously wrong Lol.</p>
<p>The point was that there didn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule to eliminate A. I was looking for an actual rule; I already know that it sounds questionable. CollegeBoard’s explanation is that A is unidiomatic whereas B uses the “so… that” construction which apparently is universally acceptable.</p>