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
Jane Austen The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. The first examination came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley. In his essay, Bradley groups Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic books devoted to Austen in France was "Jane Austen" by Paul and Kate Rague published in 1914, where the Ragues set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published "Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres",