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.
