French translations of Jane Austen

In her essay, "Jane Austen and the serious modern novel," Kathryn Sutherland discusses some of the "specific features that mark Austen's contribution to the novel as a serious modern literary form." According to Sutherland, Austen's greatest achievement is the ¨Dnarrative method inflected by the personal subjectivity of a self-conversing heroine¡¬ most evident in Persuasion, Austen¡®s posthumously published "late" novel, which appeared in 1818, bound with Northanger Abbey in "two-decker" format (Sutherland 253). In a similar vein, Valerie Shaw observes that Austen makes one of her "subdued" heroines, Anne Elliot, "live more in a consciousness of life's felt complexities than in rationalistic formulations about life." The narrative discourse in Persuasion certainly evinces a predilection for the representation of the heroine's perceptions, thoughts and feelings; in short, her consciousness is the novel's "experiencing centre," which is conveyed by a narrative technique discernible beyond the sentence level, known as free indirect discourse (FID). FID is a complex modality because of its heterogeneity; it produces "dual-voiced effects" in narrative through its hybridity. This term owes much to Bakhtin's concept of "double-voiced speech" (or type three discourses). Double-voiced speech is characterised by two (or more) utterances: "one overt and manifest, the other covert and implicit in the surface utterance."