Austen is most renowned for her development of free indirect speech, a technique pioneered by 18th-century novelists Henry Fielding and Frances Burney.[17] In free indirect speech, the thoughts and speech of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator. Austen uses it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress, dramatically or ironically, a character's speech and thoughts.[18] In Sense and Sensibility, Austen experiments extensively for the first time with this technique.[19] For example,
Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. She begged him to think again on the subject. How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum?[20]
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."[21] 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.[22]She often uses indirect speech for background characters. However, Page writes that "for Jane Austen...the supreme virtue of free indirect speech...[is] that it offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance for a moment of a total silencing of the authorial voice."[23]
