Austen's Craft

Austen mastered free indirect discourse: the narrator's voice slips into a character's thoughts without quotation marks. Reading Elizabeth, you sit inside her head and feel her certainty, while the narrator quietly hints at exactly where that certainty is wrong.

That double vision, inside and outside at once, is what gives the prose its famous wit. She published anonymously, simply "by a Lady," yet the style is so distinctive that scholars can spot her sentences anywhere.