As I take my regular
walks, I listen to lectures from the Great Courses. Right now I am doing a
series called “The English Novel,” and Friday’s lectures were on Jane Austin.
During the second lecture,
Professor Timothy Spurgin talked about how Austin improved on the novelists of
her day by finding a way to combine emotional immediacy with narrative control.
By having her narrator use a central character’s speech patterns and
vocabulary, the narrator remains on the scene without crowding the character out.
Professor Spurgin called
the technique “free indirect discourse” or “free indirect speech,” but it
sounds a lot like what many writers call “deep POV.”
Austin did not use deep
POV all the time. She moved between distances frequently within a scene and
sometimes within the same paragraph. They weren’t large leaps, but they were
there. And if she did it, that gives me permission to do it as well.
I won’t use the same
passage that Professor Spurgin used to demonstrate the technique, because that
might be a spoiler for someone who hasn’t read Emma but intends to. So instead I’ll use two passages from around
the middle of Northanger Abbey
The protagonist, Catherine
Morland, is an avid reader of gothic novels. When she is invited to the Tilney’s
country home, her imagination turns it into a mysterious mansion with a dangerous
secret. Alone in her room, she spots a chest that seems out-of-place. Notice
how this passage starts inside her thoughts but attributes them to her by the
use of quotation marks, moves outside while still acknowledging her presence by
the use of “Catherine” and “she,” and then ends with a totally unattributed
sentence that comes from within.
“This is strange indeed! I did not expect such a sight as
this!—An immense heavy chest!—What can it hold?—Why should it be placed here?—Pushed
back too, as if meant to be out of sight! I will look into it—cost me what it
may. I will look into it—and directly too—by day-light.—If I stay till evening
my candle may go out.” She advanced and examined it closely: it was of cedar,
curiously inlaid with some darker wood, and raised, about a foot from the
ground, on a carved stand of the same. The lock was silver, though tarnished
from age; at each end were the imperfect remains of handles also of silver,
broken perhaps prematurely by some strange violence; and, on the centre of the
lid, was a mysterious cypher, in the same metal. Catherine bent over it
intently, but without being able to distinguish any thing with certainty. She
could not, in whatever direction she took it, believe the last letter to be a T; and yet that it should be any thing
else in that house was a circumstance to raise no common degree of
astonishment. If not originally theirs, by what strange events could it have
fallen into the Tilney family?
When Catherine finally
has a chance to look inside, the chest contains nothing but ordinary bedding.
So then she turns her attention to an old-fashioned black cabinet that fights
her attempts to open it. When she finally does get it open, drawer after drawer
is empty. Except one. Back in a corner, as if shoved out of sight, is a roll of
paper. Events intervene and keep her from reading it until the following
morning. But when she does . . . well, here’s what happens.
Her
greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be
possible, or did not her senses play her false?—An inventory of linen, in
coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! . . . She felt
humbled to the dust. Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her
wisdom?
Again, we go seamlessly
from outside to inside within a single paragraph.
To some people, Jane
Austin was just another romance writer. To me, she was an innovator whose
novels are timeless, whose techniques are still in use today, and whose writing
teaches me how to improve my own.
Thank you, Jane.
__________
The picture is a
watercolor and pencil drawing of Jane Austin by her sister, Cassandra Austin,
around 1810. The picture and the quoted passages are in the public domain
because of their age.
