ABSTRACT

The orthodox view of the history of free indirect discourse (FID) is that free indirect speech (FIS) is much older than free indirect thought (FIT), or at least it is commonly observable much earlier than FIT becomes common. The earliest occurrences of FID are all the more or less satirical use of FIS, not FIT, and are very close to the newspaper practice of using FIS to report speech. Whatever the truth of this, Jane Austen's first uses of FID are only very slightly later than The Loiterer. They occur in 1792, in Catharine, which is one of the most interesting of Jane Austen's juvenile works. To begin with, it is worth reiterating the point about FID as a discrete 'device' which Fludernik makes: when Austen worked on Sense and Sensibility, she did not conduct a first experiment in using FID.