I think if you had to fix on one thing that Jane Austen does that's special to
her that was extraordinary at the time she did it because nobody's ever done it
before and which kind of characterizes the kind of the audacity really of her
fiction it's the way that she she allows the consciousness of her characters to
sort of change the direction of her narrative so the way she percolates her
narrative through the minds of her characters there's a name for this
actually but it's not a name that Jane Austen had in her armoury it's called
free indirect style but that name was given to this technique much much later
in the history of the novel and in the early 19th century when Jane Austen was
writing it was a technique that nobody really tried before in Sense and
Sensibility what it means is that a lot of the time the narrative when it's
being most sort of judicious and judgemental it's not reflecting Jane
Austen's point of view so much as reflecting Elinor's point of view her
consciousness of what's going on and it's the reason I think people sometimes
think that Elinor who is after all only 19 years old these rather sort of
preternaturally judicious and even moralistic because the really crucial
judgments in the novel come from her and not from the author and I often think
that the great thing about Jane Austen is that unlike some other wonderful
novelist Dickens or George Eliot she's not really there in her novels at all
actually it's it's a characters viewpoints and judgments that as a
reader you're asked to to see and her views are kind of wonderfully obscured
and this technique goes through all her picture and she develops it for the
first time in Sense and Sensibility but then it becomes more and more
sophisticated in her later novels perhaps the most sophisticated use of it
is in a fourth novel Emma where most of the
novel is seen through the iron eyes of a heroine who is mostly wrong about
everything and so when you read it you are sharing in her delusions I mean in
her misjudgments and that's something that is very characteristic Boston to
her heroines even Elinor even wise judicious Elinor are often wrong about
things only partially informed about things coming to conclusions which are
either hasty or provisional and you have to share their viewpoints and she has
this sort of amazing technical ability to make you do so.