Jane Austen, free indirect style, gender and interiority in literary fiction.

Austen is known for her development of free indirect style as a narrative form. Free indirect style is a fusion of narrator and character perspectives, a peculiar linguistic manipulation of deictic centres which allows for a semi-experiential representation of a character’s perceptions, thoughts and experiences. The style does not tell, it shows, and in doing so it invites close engagement with and empathetic reading of character, at the same time as maintaining the distance of a third-person narrative. This can be a powerful narrative device with complex effects.