Austen the Innovator

In a superb essay in The Guardian, John Mullan (like Wayne Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction) explains how Jane Austen’s Emma transformed the writing of fiction. She found a way to split the difference between the omniscient third-person narrator and the limited first-person narrator, creating what came to be called “free indirect discourse,” a subtle blend of distance and intimacy that creates new possibilities for comic narration. 

Mullan gives a number of splendid examples: “To measure the audacity of the book, take a simple sentence that no novelist before her could have written. Our privileged heroine has befriended a sweet, open, deeply naive girl of 17 called Harriet Smith. It is a wholly unequal relationship: Emma is the richest and cleverest woman in Highbury; Harriet is the ‘natural daughter of someone,’ left as a permanent resident of the genteel girls’ boarding school in the town. While cultivating their relationship, Emma knows very well that Harriet is her inferior. ‘But in every respect as she saw more of her, she was confirmed in all her kind designs.’ The sentence is in the third person, yet we are not exactly being told something by the author. ‘Kind designs’ is Emma’s complacent judgment of herself. Even the rhyme in the phrase makes it sound better to herself. In fact, the kindness is all in the mind of the beholder. Emma has set out to mould Harriet. Emma’s former companion, Miss Taylor, has got married and become Mrs Weston, leaving her solitary and at a loose end. Harriet will be her project. Her plans are kind, she tells herself, because she will improve this uninstructed and wide-eyed young woman. We should be able to hear, however, that her designs are utterly self-serving. Soon she is persuading Harriet to refuse a marriage proposal from a farmer who loves her, and beguiling her with the wholly illusory prospect of marriage to the smooth young vicar, Mr Elton.”

At one critical point in the story, Austen lets us see through someone else’s eyes – Mr. Knightley, neither self-absorbed nor snobby, and therefore a more reliable witness than Emma: “Austen jolts the reader with a chapter from Mr Knightley’s point of view. It comes at a crucial point, where Frank uncharacteristically blunders by mentioning an item of parochial gossip that he can only know from his secret correspondence with Jane.” Knightley observes Frank and Jane during a game and suspects something is up. He’s right, but the tiny glimpse of the Bronte romance that blinkered Emma misses is fleeting, too fleeting perhaps for a first-time reader to fully appreciate.

Mullan makes clear that this is more than a stylistic device for Austen. When Emma comes to recognize her love for Knightley, Austen writes: “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” Mullan observes, “What a brilliant sentence that is! With absolute daring, Austen shows us that love can be a discovery of what a person has unknowingly felt for many a long month or year. Now, suddenly and for the first time, Emma understands the plot of her own story. But even at this moment of self-knowledge Austen lets us hear or feel the character’s imperiousness, her overpowering sense that events ‘must’ meet her desires.”

Austen is often regarded – by those who don’t read her – as a safe writer of drawing room romances. She is anything but, a novelist as innovative in her way as Joyce. And more: Mullan is not exaggerating Austen’s skill when he writes, “instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.”