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 regard, MacIntyre used Austen as an "Aristotelian" writer whose books offered up examples of how to be virtuous, with the English country estate playing the same role that the "polis" did for Aristotle. By contrast, Mary Evans in her 1987 book "Jane Austen and the State" depicted Austen as a proto-Marxist concerned with the "stability of human relationships and communities" and against "conspicuous consumption" and the "individualisation of feeling" promoted by the Industrial Revolution. In her 1987 book "Desire and Domestic Fiction", Nancy Armstrong, in a study much influenced by the theories of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, argued that