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 Austen was R. W. Chapman, whose magisterial edition of Austen's collected works was the first scholarly edition of the works of any English novelist. The Chapman texts have remained the basis for all subsequent editions of Austen's works. In the wake of Bradley and Chapman's contributions, the 1920s saw a boom in Austen scholarship, and the novelist E. M. Forster primarily illustrated his concept of the "round" character by citing Austen's works. It was with the 1939 publication of Mary Lascelles' "Jane Austen and Her Art"—"the first full-scale historical and scholarly study" of Austen—that the academic study of her works