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.