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 Republic of China in 1949, Austen was in disfavor with the authorities who only wanted Western authors to be published in translation whose work could be presented as representing the West in a negative light, and Austen was regarded as too "frivolous" for this purpose. As hostile as the treatment of Austen was in the 1950s, it paled besides the treatment of her books during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China between 1966–69, when Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist" author. In the late 1970s, Austen was allowed to be published in China, where her popularity with