ABSTRACT
On March 23, 1817, four months before her death, Jane Austen described her “ideas of Novels and Heroines” in a letter to her niece Fanny Knight: “pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked” (198). Austen’s disdain for perfection translated into sympathy for human imperfection, frailty, and pathology. Austen uses her famously flexible narrative voice—sustained by techniques narratologists call indirect discourse or free indirect speech—to lampoon flawed characters and render them sympathetic simultaneously. Austen, if not the English originator of the technique—Burney is often credited with this—deployed indirect discourse more consistently and subtly than any novelist before her, so it is no surprise that she uses the technique to dramatize the mental lives of hypochondriac characters like Emma’s Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Churchill and Sanditon’s Parker family. What is surprising is that nineteenth-century medical writers consistently use indirect discourse—a technique almost universally assumed to be the sole province of literature—to narrate actual cases of hypochondria.
