In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, we see inside Lady Russell’s mind when the narrator slips into a technique called free indirect speech or free indirect discourse(19). Some critics believe that Austen is the first English novelist to employ this technique. In this technique, the narrator uses the tone and diction of a character but does not put those words within quotation marks and does not attribute those words (either directly or indirectly) to the character. [For example: Sally studied all Saturday night. Had her stinking professors plotted to ruin her weekend?]
The effect of free indirect speech on the reader is like a zoom lens closing in on the mind of the character. Look at the bottom of page 18, and you will see what I mean. First, start looking at the sentence before the free indirect speech begins:. We have first Sir Walter’s reaction to Wentworth’s proposal and then Lady Russell’s:
He thought it a very degrading alliance; and Lady Russell, though with more tempered and pardonable pride, received it as a most unfortunate one.(18)
In this sentence, we hear the narrator’s voice, but with the next paragraph, we are inside Lady Russell’s mind rather than with an objective narrator. Listen!
Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen — involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connections to secure even his farther rise in that profession — would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune; or rather sunk by him into a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependance! It must not be, if by any fair interference of friendship, any representations from one who had almost a mother’s love, and mother’s rights, it would be prevented. (18-19)
Phrases such as “throw herself away” and “snatched off by a stranger” indicate to us that we are no longer in the hands of an objective narrator; rather, we are overhearing the inner workings of Lady Russell’s mind.