In the first chapter of the first book that Jane Austen ever published, Sense and Sensibility, she did something that changed fiction forever.
The narrator of the book begins by describing the situation of the Dashwood family.
John Dashwood has come into a big inheritance from his father Henry, who on his deathbed makes John promise to take care of his three half-sisters.
When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a piece.
He then really thought himself equal to it.
The prospect of 4,000 a year made him feel capable of generosity.
Yes, he would give them 3,000 pounds.
It would be liberal and handsome.
It would be enough to make them completely easy.
3,000 pounds, he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.
He thought of it all day long and for many days successively, and he did not repent.
So what stands out in this passage?
Which of these things is not like the rest?
Well, it's this part here.
Before this, the narrator is describing the thoughts and feelings of John Dashwood.
But in the highlighted section, something changes.
It's suddenly as if we're inside John's mind.
And yet, the point of view doesn't change.
We're still in the third person.
Now Austen could have reported John's thoughts directly here writing.
I will give them 3000 pounds, or I can spare so considerable a sum.
But she doesn't.
Instead, she does something new in English literature, what's called free indirect speech.
Now, Austen isn't the first to use this technique, but she's the first author to do so consistently, the first to really explore its possibilities.
And in the process, she effectively adds a new tool to the writer's toolbox.
But why?
What is free indirect style good for?
Why not just use direct thought?
Well, if you're familiar with Jane Austen, you know that all of her books have a really strong narratorial voice.
The narrator has full control over the story, painting a universe of manners, making witty asides to the reader and using irony to critique characters and social conventions.
To accomplish her goals, Austen needed her narrator to have critical distance from the story.
But this ironic distance has the potentially negative side effect of distancing the characters from the reader.
I mean, she still needs us to be emotionally involved with these people, after all.
Free indirect speech is Austen's intuitive and revolutionary solution for having it both ways.
Okay.
Let's look at another subtler example from Emma, as the matchmaking title character thinks about the suitability of Mr Elton for her friend Harriet Smith.
The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency.
Mr. Elton's situation was most suitable quite the gentleman himself and without low connections.
He had a comfortable home for her and Emma imagined a very sufficient income, for though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property.
And she thought very highly of him as a good humored, well-meaning, respectable young man.
Like the first passage, this one begins firmly in the first-person narratorial voice with she considered and her sense.
Then in the second sentence, it seamlessly switches to free indirect speech and we're inside Emma's mind, which you can tell by phrasing like most suitable and quite the gentleman.
After this, it starts to get tricky.
Austen begins to weave in and out of free and direct speech within individual sentences.
The narrator returns with phrases like, Emma imagined and she thought.
And as critic Daniel Gunn points out, this return and the distance it creates reminds us to be wary of Emma's judgments and imaginings.
But then we slip right back into her spirit again, her subjectivity in clauses, like a good-humored well-meaning, respectable young man.
In Emma especially, Austen uses free indirect speech with extraordinary finesse, dipping in and out of several minds without ever interrupting the flow of narration.
Representing subjectivities, as Dunn says, with great immediacy, while still providing a frame within which that subjectivity can be understood.
At the end of the novel we get the The amazing convergence of these two voices, as Emma's self-deception becomes self-knowledge, as her inner voice finally aligns with what the narrator and the reader have seen all along.
Free indirect speech is a formal innovation that changed the course of literature.
Now, it's impossible to say who Austen influenced directly, but she effectively created a tool that thousands and thousands of authors used and still use, including some of the most famous ever, like George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Unlike these other authors, Jane Austen is often belittled for her seemingly lightweight marriage comedies.
But that critique misses the complex formal dynamics that are working under the surface.
If you really want to see Austen's genius, you have to look deeper.
You have to look at the language.
Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.
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