Everything Flaubert did, Jane Austen did first.

When will Jane Austen get the recognition she deserves?

Since Flaubert, writing fiction has been about controlling how different grammatical units “belong” to different characters through judicious use of free indirect discourse.

I know

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

a little and respect him, and I thought his novel was funny and admirable, but the short response to this (published in The Metropolitan Review) is “no”. Jane Austen did it first. James Wood wrote in How Fiction Works: “Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” His mistake is prevalent. But Emma is the source. Not Madam Bovary. Austen invented and perfected free indirect style. This is not a controversial idea. It is not even something we can debate. There is a century of scholarship about this. In the Oxford edition of Emma, John Mullan says Emma is a major experimental novel like Madame Bovary or Ulysses. Perhaps Flaubert gets all the attention because he left letters that explain his tortured artistic process, whereas poor old Jane Austen is merely a genius who refused to explain herself. One place to start with this is Mullan’s book What Matters in Jane Austen, as well as older scholars like Mary Lascelles and Dorrit Cohn. Thomas’s piece is interesting and this was a small aside (which the editors should have picked up). But it does matter, and it is very simple, and very well known. It’s time we stopped talking as if Jane Austen chanced upon her major innovations. It’s like thinking Beethoven tripped and hit the keyboard and came up with the Ninth Symphony.

You can read the rest of Thomas’s piece here.

The Prophet and the Barbarians

Jane Austen looking cross because everyone gives Flaubert the credit for her genius.