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 discourse allowed the reader to understand Emma mind without becoming limited by it. Another major theme of Austen scholarship has concerned the question of the "Bildungsroman" (novel of education). D.D Devlin in "Jane Austen and Education" (1975) argued that Austen's novels were all in varying ways "Bildungsroman", where Austen put into practice Enlightenment theories about how the character of young people can develop and change. The Italian literary critic Franco Moretti in his 1987 book "The Way of the World" called "Pride and Prejudice" a "classic" "Bildungsroman", where Elizabeth Bennet's "prejudice" against Mr. Darcy is really "distrust" and that "she