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 they should be. These revisionist views, together with prominent critic F. R. Leavis's pronouncement in "The Great Tradition" (1948) that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction, a view shared by Ian Watt, who helped shape the scholarly debate regarding the genre of the novel, did much to cement Austen's reputation amongst academics. They agreed that she "combined <nowiki>[</nowiki>Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's<nowiki>]</nowiki> qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both". The period after the Second World War saw a flowering of scholarship on Austen as well as a diversity