ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the developments in the rendering of characters' speech and thought which were connected to orality, culminating in the most important of these, free indirect discourse (FID). A comparison between Marianne's and Emma's 'error speeches' shows Austen's early and late styles of speech very sharply indeed. Jane Austen's representation of speech and thought in her novels is sometimes notably 'hybrid'. This kind of hybrid formation is extremely common in Austen, and it occurs in other writers too, including Burney and Charlotte Bronte. Austen used the hybrid form eight times in The Watsons, as a way of rendering routine social politenesses which may or may not have any real feeling behind them. If Mansfield Park suggests that Austen had rediscovered possibilities in this hybrid, Emma takes the process of experiment with it much further. There are 76 hybrid speeches in Emma, again distributed very widely.
