Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of Temporality

This essay argues that free indirect discourse arose not merely as a means of interrogating the thoughts of others. Rather, it served, especially during its emergence in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as a means of manipulating fictional time. Early practitioners, such as Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, employed it mostly to merge fictional time with the real time of the reader. Jane Austen, by contrast, expanded its temporal flexibility, using it, especially in Persuasion , to access events falling outside of the typical timeline of the novel.