ABSTRACT
Jane Austen’s Emma deploys, with a kind of casual or even whimsical bravado, a sophisticated, and for the reader morally challenging, range of rhetorical and ironic techniques. Flaubert’s deployment of free indirect style is indeed brilliant and unsettling but Jane Austen’s use of it in Emma is no less brilliant. To restrict free indirect style to Emma herself is particularly daring of Jane Austen. With a couple of exceptions all the chapters in the novel are restricted to Emma’s point of view. The last of Emma’s mistakes is to think that Harriet has fallen for Frank because he rescues her from the gypsies. At the end of the Box Hill scene and following Mr Knightley’s very stern rebuking of Emma for her cruel treatment of Miss Bates, it’s the carriage that is moving too quickly and it’s all too late.
