Name: How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T17:17:39.000Z
Duration: 5 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the first chapter of the first book that Jane Austen ever published, Sense and Sensibility, she did something that changed fiction forever.

The narrator of the book begins by describing the situation of the Dashwood family.

John Dashwood has come into a big inheritance from his father Henry, who on his deathbed makes John promise to take care of his three half sisters.

When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds apiece.

He then really thought his himself equal to it.

The prospect of 4,000 a year made him feel capable of generosity.

It would be enough to make them completely easy.

He could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.

He thought of it all day long and for many days successively, and he did not repent.

Which of these things is not like the rest of the.

Before this, the narrator is describing the thoughts and feelings of John Dashwood.

But in the highlighted section, something changes.

It's suddenly as if we're inside John's mind, and yet the point of view doesn't change.

Now, Austen could have reported John's thoughts directly here, writing, I will give them £3,000, or I can spare so considerable a sum.

Instead, she does something new in English literature, what's called free indirect speech.

Now, Austen isn't the first use this technique, but

she's the first author to do so consistently, the first to really explore its possibilities.

And in the process, she effectively adds a new tool to the writer's toolbox.

Well, if you're familiar with Jane Austen, you know that all of her books have a really strong narratorial voice.

The narrator has full control over the story, painting a universe of manners, making witty asides to the reader, and

using irony to critique characters, characters and social conventions.

To accomplish her goals, Austen needed her narrator to have critical distance from the story.

But this ironic distance has the potentially negative side effect of distancing the characters from the reader.

I mean, she still needs us to be emotionally involved with these people.

After all, free indirect speech is Austen's intuitive and revolutionary solution for having it both ways.

Okay, let's look at another, subtler example from Emma.

As the matchmaking title character thinks about the suitability of Mr. Elton for her friend Harriet Smith.

The longer she considered it, the greater was her sense of its expediency.

Quite the gentleman himself, and without low connections, he had a comfortable home for her, and

For though the vicarage of Highbury was not large, he was known to have some independent property, and

she thought very highly of him as a good humored, well meaning, respectable young man.

Like the first passage, this one begins firmly in the first person narratorial voice with she considered and her sense.

Then in the second sentence it seamlessly switches to free indirect speech and we're inside Emma's mind, which you can tell by phrasing like most suitable and quite the gentleman.

Austen begins to weave in and out of free indirect speech within individual sentences.

The narrator returns with phrases like Emma imagined and she thought.

And as critic Daniel Gunn points out, this return and the distance it creates reminds us to be wary of Emma's judgments and imaginings.

But then we slip right back into her spirit again, her subjectivity.

In clauses like a good humored, well meaning, respectable young man in Emma especially, Austen uses free indirect speech with extraordinary finesse, dipping in and out of several minds without ever interrupting the flow of narration, representing subjectivities, as Donne says, with great immediacy, while still providing a frame within which that subjectivity can be understood.

At the end of the novel, we get the amazing convergence of these two voices as Emma's self deception becomes self knowledge, as her inner voice finally aligns with what the narrator and the reader have seen all along.

Free indirect speech is a formal innovation that changed the course of literature.

It's impossible to say who Austen influenced directly, but

she effectively created a tool that thousands and thousands of authors used and still use, including some of the most famous ever, like George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and

Unlike these other authors, Jane Austen is often belittled for her seemingly lightweight marriage comedies.

But that critique misses the complex formal dynamics that are working under the surface.

If you really want to see Austen's genius, you have to look deeper.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

If you liked this video, check out my book of essays, Escape Into Meaning, which is currently on sale at the link below.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you don't know, Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place, all on your terms.

Their templates are flexible, their blogging tools are super easy to use, and

Squarespace provides you with all the analytics you need to iterate and grow your business.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.