Dramatizing Intimacy: Confessions and Free Indirect Discourse in Sense and Sensibility

This essay investigates the unique place Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility occupies in her development of free indirect discourse. The novel reworks the original epistolary design of Elinor and Marianne into third-person narration, and it contains extended passages of direct discourse. Characters make these extended speeches when they confess their pasts to Elinor, who then repackages their stories for others. This essay argues that the confession scenes in Sense and Sensibility not only reveal the back-stories of the novel, but also dramatize the interplay between voices that characterizes Austen's development of free indirect discourse.