“Authors have long incorporated mysteries and riddles for their readers to decipher, but Austen changed what readers could consider trustworthy.”

Abigail L. Nordstrom, University of Montana

She is given credit for the detective novel. For impressionistic writing. For fictional idiolect—distinct and recognizable speaking habits of individual characters. For writing the first characters who lied to themselves, and of being the first to use those characters’ willful self-deception to propel a plot. But mostly she is given credit for inventing free-indirect speech. It’s a term that still manages to conjure a fog of confusion in my mind despite knowing exactly what it means, but the more I read her the more I realized that a picture of the little trickster was forming in my mind, and that the picture was part definition.

THE NARRATOR AS MOCKINGBIRD: free indirect speech

Jane Austen uses third-person narration. Elizabeth Bennet is not narrating Pride and Prejudice. And yet, she kind of is, as are about nineteen other characters at one time or another as Austen slips in and out of their voices. (At some point I’m going to do some counting of my own, because I strongly suspect that number to be low.) Wikipedia has a really weak page on the technique of free indirect speech, or free indirect discourse, or free indirect style, but to be fair to my fellow Wikipedia editors, it’s harder to explain than to just show. 

By page seven of Pride and Prejudice we know how Mrs. Bennet sounds, but this is not, “Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted and thought to herself, ‘What business could he have in town so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire?’” It is most definitely the narrator, and yet…

Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted. She could not imagine what business he could have in town so soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire; and she began to fear that he might be always flying about from one place to another, and never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be.

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 3

“Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted” is narrator. Then at a place I cannot name with certainty we slip into what sounds like Mrs. Bennet’s “voice,” are definitely there by the time Bingley “might be always flying about from one place to another,” and there’s no question that “never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be” is all Mrs. Bennet. Except that, technically, it’s not. 

This bit in Chapter 4 is actually one of my favorites in the whole book. It doesn’t hit you over the head, but at the same time it captures Bingley and Darcy so perfectly and moves between them so smoothly that it is almost a work of art. The narrator is telling us about Bingley and Darcy and then suddenly Bingley’s voice is coming from the narrator’s mouth, and then it’s not Bingley, it’s Darcy. Austen took the skills of an expert impersonator and moved them to the written page.

The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.

Pride and Prejudice ❦ Chapter 4

“[B]ut she smiled too much” gets me every time.

And Jane Austen uses this for more than just style. It is the delivery system of her plot. She uses it to keep us in suspense. To keep us guessing. To keep us a little unsure. She would soon use it to support an entire novel with Emma, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not crucial to Pride and Prejudice, too. She is still very determined to hide some things from us that are occurring in front of our very eyes, but as someone who lived at a time where most families only had a few books that they read again and again, she found a new way to give readers new discoveries on each re-read. By turning the third-person narrator into a mockingbird plus giving us a version of an unreliable narrator in Elizabeth—technically Elizabeth is not narrating, but as we are seeing almost everything through her eyes she acts as a narrator for most of the text—she discovered an entirely new plot device, and it is what makes her so much fun to read and re-read and re-read again.

Accuracy is her genius. Noticing minutiae will lead you to the wonderful connectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place will flare with the recollection of something that went much earlier. This is one of the reasons they bear such re-reading. Every quirk you notice leads you to a design. The boon of Austen’s confidence is that the reader can take confidence too, knowing that if he or she follows some previously neglected thread it will produce a satisfying pattern.

John Mullan; “What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Puzzles Solved”

And it is that combination that Austen uses to trick us: free indirect speech—the mockingbird—plus an unreliable not-exactly-narrator. Because although the narrator, as narrator, will not lie to us, as readers it can be very difficult to notice when Austen pulls down the distinction between narrator and character. If one is specifically looking out for it, one will see it—because again, Austen is scrupulously honest—but she is also clever and expects us to be clever, too. She sets puzzles. There are simply things one cannot catch on the first reading because one does not know what they ought to be looking for, and that is what makes Austen so much fun. Discovering all the little things that she hides in plain sight. The way she can make a conversation make complete sense from one character’s point of view, and then later, when you realize that the other character in the conversation was operating in a wholly different reality, the conversation is a whole different conversation that makes even more sense. 

So while the narrator herself is not unreliable, the characters are. They are limited by everything we humans are limited by, and in Pride and Prejudice we get most of our information through Elizabeth. With a few exceptions it is her thoughts and feelings that our information is filtered through, but also, the narrator is able to move around and tell us things that Elizabeth cannot see or hear. And then there is that blurry place where the narrator shifts from sounding like Elizabeth, to being Elizabeth, and back again, and Austen does it so seamlessly that it can be difficult to catch. If you stop and take the time to do a mental electrophoresis the separation is there, but when we read we tend not to do that. It is in that blurry place that the puzzles hide.

In some places it is more obvious, but not always. In looking for examples that won’t spoil things too early for my friends who have never read Austen, the only example I could come up with quickly is one of the more obvious thoughts of Elizabeth that happens by the time we mostly know that she is reading everything wrong, but the amazing thing is that in those other examples that I won’t use and that happen in the chapter after this, I have heard several close-reading Pride and Prejudice podcasts by smart people who are still missing the fact that—despite all the tells that read almost exactly like this example—Lizzy is wrong in her assumptions and the conversation that is happening has an entirely different reading. And now that you comprehend the conversation that other character thought he was having, the earth all around that conversation neatly settles into a new topography. Your map has been updated. You see a path that had been obscured before, a comment from an observer that seemed just another part of her confusion shimmers with meaning, and it is not only what came before that has shifted, but some of what comes after has managed to shift, too. You have a new chart, and suddenly a detail from ten chapters later gains significance.

In this example of a fairly obvious separation from the narrator Mr. Darcy pays a visit to the parsonage in Kent and finds Elizabeth alone, a very bad situation for a person who is not good at talking and who for most of the book is only able to be comfortable when one of his more outgoing friends is around. Nonetheless, Darcy works up to a topic of some importance to him that he needs to know Elizabeth’s feelings on, and in this case he ends up flat on his face, feeling exposed and embarrassed because Elizabeth is working off an entirely different script. It’s a good example because it is so clear that we have moved from third person narration into Lizzy’s head, and everything signals to us that she’s probably getting things totally wrong. However, the fact that it’s so clear is still helpful in identifying the places where Austen is sneakier.

As he spoke there was a sort of smile which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield…

Pride and Prejudice; Chapter 32

“Elizabeth fancied she understood” is an immediate red flag that Elizabeth doesn’t understand anything, but by this point in the novel we are almost at the inflection point and the separation between the narrator and Elizabeth is becoming more marked.

And since no one who hasn’t read the book will see this page until I’m ready, I’m going to fill the example out, because although it’s still a fairly obvious example of something we shouldn’t trust—and even though the context should make us more sure that Lizzy is getting things wrong—it also shows how well Austen can bury the obvious and make us more unsure than we should be.

Darcy begins:

“It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Anything beyond the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.” 

As he spoke there was a sort of smile which Elizabeth fancied she understood; he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered— 

“I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expenses of travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the case here. Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not such a one as will allow of frequent journeys—and I am persuaded my friend would not call herself near her family under less than half the present distance.” 

Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “you cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.” 

Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and glancing over it, said, in a colder voice— 

“Are you pleased with Kent?” 

A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either side calm and concise—and soon put an end to by the entrance of Charlotte and her sister, just returned from her walk.

But Austen doesn’t just use the trick of free-indirect-speech to keep uncertainty alive. She also uses regular old exposition to keep us from having much time to process events, much less the space to form opinions about them. Or another character—even one we would not normally trust—says something or thinks something that is just enough to keep us off balance.

Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss Bingley warmly resented the indignity he had received, in an expostulation with her brother for talking such nonsense.

Pride and Prejudice; Chapter 10

Caroline Bingley doesn’t read Mr. Darcy right once throughout the whole novel, but because she scolds her brother for saying something funny that Mr. Darcy clearly enjoys—he smiles, something the reader can always trust—it gives what “Elizabeth thought she could perceive” just enough corroboration to keep us from fully deciding she’s wrong. Or deciding anything at all. And that is what Austen is best at doing. Keeping us from the little verdicts that we naturally accumulate throughout a novel. We suspend our judgment again and again. We suspect, we think, we doubt, but we fear being too certain about anything, because we could definitely be wrong. And most of the scenes that I’ve found something new in have come from me going in with the deliberate intention of reading everything “as if…” Taking a chance. I don’t usually do that. I like to be judicious and not make calls that I cannot back up, but once I’ve read something fifty times I feel like I’m on solid enough ground to have a little fun. Still, even then it can be difficult to reorient myself and keep on the new track. Habit takes over. I know what’s going to happen and I fall into autopilot. And unlike a normal mystery novel where you get a clear cut analysis of how the crime was committed in the finale so that you know what clues to look for on a re-read, Austen doesn’t always break out the game film to study at the end of a story. She does tend to give us a little recap—some discussion between the main characters of what has come before—and it’s highly satisfying, but sometimes it’s not enough to teach us what to look for on the next read. Reading is such a trusting venture that it’s quite hard to re-read a scene and to take new liberties that the author hasn’t given explicit permission to take. But with Austen, in those scenes where you’re not quite sure if you’re missing something, I cannot recommend it enough. It won’t work out every time you try it, but when it works it’s an incredible experience. I don’t know why it’s so much fun and I don’t know if it should be, I only know that it is. I’ve never actually found buried treasure so I can’t say what it’s like, but I honestly cannot believe that it would be better than this. And if you’re onto something, you will soon find out whether it’s just your imagination or not, because once you point your lens in a new direction you will either encounter a brick wall or immediately begin to find hard evidence for an alternate take. If you think that maybe a character was actually doing this thing for a particular reason and find nothing to support it, then you’re surely imagining it. But what happens far more often, at least with me, is that suddenly bits of dialogue that went by unnoticed before stand out and prove the new theory, some narrative threads are no longer loose, and a few puzzle pieces I’d set aside as extraneous click into place. Austen has left you the proofs. She was there long before you were, and she rarely drops a stitch. If you’re on the right track, the breadcrumbs appear. She will not leave you in a state of uncertainty.

“There is a level of intelligence in her work that the reader feels, and it has to do with her psychological perceptiveness and the sheer skill of her writing. When you read Jane Austen, you sense that you’re in the hands of someone authoritative and reliable… But there is always this feeling that she is one step ahead of you.” 

Alex Woloch, chair of the Stanford University Department of English

I read and listened to Pride and Prejudice about twenty times last summer while making jewelry, and it was that that led me into Emma and all my later discoveries. I felt like I had found things in Pride and Prejudice that no one else had noticed, but when I set it down to move on I also thought that there was nothing new to find. I almost knew it by heart, and after listening to three or four podcasts about it and writing a whole lot about it, at least to myself, what else was there? Then, mostly because I had a few friends who wanted to be good friends to me and read Emma, I went back into Pride and Prejudice a little, because it’s a much easier book to start with and I thought I would write out some contextual information. Rules of address, how livings worked for the clergy, marriage settlements, the militia, and the like. Things I wished I had known when I first read it. But lo and behold I found that there were whole new levels to it, and this last week has been a week of discoveries. I can recite large sections of Pride and Prejudice word-for-word and yet am still finding new puzzles to solve and new backstories to revel in. I was a fool to think that Emma was the only Austen novel holding secrets, because just when we think we’ve solved all her puzzles a new treasure chest appears. 

Did Austen definitely, for sure, invent free-indirect-speech? 

I’ve tried to answer this conclusively many times, but this morning I was determined to get to the bottom of it. Or at least to a point where I could quit fudging the way it needed to be written. Goethe and Austen get dual credit in everything I’ve read, and so Austen gets a sort of “English-language” asterisk. Goethe was born before Austen and died after her, and despite a ridiculous amount of reading I cannot pin down which of his literary works used it, so he may have used the technique a few years before she did, or a few years after she did. The only thing I can know for sure is that if he did, it wasn’t much before Austen began using it and it would have been in a book that was still only available in German. So we’ll stick to the English-language limitation, but also she didn’t pick up a German book by Goethe and think, “I could do that in English.” Clearly Goethe and Austen both invented it on their own, and that’s pretty damn good company to be in.

There is some argument that Chaucer used it in a few scattered lines, but you need a magnifying glass to be sure, and Austen scholar John Mullan writes that “Jane Spencer detects glimmerings of free indirect style in the fiction of Austen’s most notable contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, and something like the germ of the technique in the same novel that Lodge scrutinises, Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796).” But in all these other examples people have found it’s a sentence or two that you have to squint to see and in the examples I’ve read the line preceding it or following it delineates who the thinker is. They’re difficult for me to be sure of anything about, and I’m mostly trusting the expert English professor that these few sentences contain something like free-indirect-discourse. “Germs” and “glimmerings” aside, Austen was, from the first, the whole blooming garden. What she did and how she did it was brand new and quietly revolutionary. 

Finally, at the end of my research I did find this from a academic journal and I thought it was funny. (It’s also the thing that told me it was the end of my research.)

While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management … The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. 

Oxford Academic, “The Madness of Free Indirect Style” by Arden Hegele

Aside from possible psychiatric notes by “mad-doctors” my girl was the first to really truly use free indirect speech, and use it to alter everything her readers experienced. Jane Austen became a mockingbird in her works, and introduced a brand new trick for telling a tale and a whole new path for writers to tread. Joyce and Kafka especially owe this little woman a tax for traveling on the road she paved.