Styles and themes of Jane Austen In "Sense and Sensibility", Austen experiments extensively for the first time with this technique. For example, As Austen scholar Norman Page explains, "the first sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the [narrator]; the third sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second and fourth are what is usually described as free indirect speech." In these two sentences, Austen represents the inner thoughts of the character and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind. She often uses indirect speech for background characters. However, Page writes that "for Jane Austen ... the supreme virtue of free
Reception history of Jane Austen being the scribe who produced these books that they admired so much. More typical of the post-1945 scholarship is Marvin Mudrick's 1952 book "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery", where he argued that Austen used irony as a way of deflating conventions and to gently challenge the reader's beliefs. In 1951, Arnold Kettle in his "Introduction to the English Novel" praised Austen for her "fineness of feeling", but complained about the "relevance" of her work to the 20th century, charging that the values of Austen's novels were too much those of Regency England to be acceptable for the 20th