Jane Austen and the Invention of Free Indirect Speech

This book reveals a new dimension of Jane Austen’s writing. While her pioneering use of Free Indirect Discourse to present interiority and create irony has long been acknowledged, the range of effects generated by her use of Free Indirect Speech has remained unrecognised. This book provides an accessible introduction to both stylistic approaches and charts the historical emergence of the latter technique in a range of eighteenth-century genres, taking into account changing typographical conventions for presenting speech.

The author uses close textual analysis to demonstrate the remarkably diverse ways in which Free Indirect Speech enriched Jane Austen’s fiction. The narrator’s ‘mimicry’ of the verbal tics of her characters is just the starting point. Sections on effects such as Formal Politeness and Condensed Conversation offer an expanded conceptual vocabulary for analysing the nuanced variety of speech presentation in her novels. The culmination of the study is a detailed examination of Emma as a case study for investigating the use of Free Indirect Speech as part of an overall narrative strategy.