What, if anything, did you think of the narrative voice? Did it seem antiquated? It seems to have poked fun at everyone from time to time, except maybe at Elinor.
One curious thing about it: Did anyone notice the sudden use of the first person by the narrator? In Chapter 36, about three pages in, there's this: "I come now to the relation of a misfortune which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood." Where did this "I" come from? I found it really jarring. I wonder whether it's in every edition. I have the Bantam Classic paperback reissue April 2006. It doesn't say what original text it's based on, if there's more than one.
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I found the sudden shift to first person jarring. I was reading a 1971 edition with a few endnotes on early edition discrepancies and obscure vocabulary.
I did notice that. Given all the omniscient information she gave at the start of the novel without introducing herself as the narrator, I thought it was odd she didn't write around it.
Did you notice it in more than one place? I noticed only that one instance. That's why it stood out to me so much.
I don't know enough about literature from this period to speculate whether that was commonplace, shifting between narrative voices, as if they just didn't think about the storyteller that much, which is radically different from, say, the later "Wuthering Heights," where the narrator is actually a character in the book and is given a great deal of thought and weight.
Or if it was just a mistake that just remained in the text. S&S was originally written as an epistolary novel. And it was her first one to be published. And it's not considered her most polished effort like P&P or "Emma."
I'm sure there are 20,000 essays written on JA's narrative voice alone. Maybe I can dig up an explanation.
Professor Eversole at KU would probably know. He was my favorite professor. His specialty is 18th century English Literature, and this is close to that.
That was the only instance of it that I noticed.
Perhaps readers of the time were not used to our modern clear division between types of narrators, and they just assumed that the narrator was first person, but too polite to say "I" very often.
Or maybe it's a mistake. You're right, I'm sure there's commentary on it out there somewhere. Maybe the annotated editions of her novels (edited by R. W. Chapman) have some notes on this.
I found it extremely jarring too. In fact, I went back and reread the previous paragraph, wondering if I had missed some kind of transition.
I can't seem to find much about it, but maybe I'm not searching for the right thing. The only thing I find is a mention of it in one essay, where the writer contends that it was an oversight resulting from Austen's having to contrive the party to set certain events in motion:
"In my essay on the calendar in the novel I suggest the sudden intrusion of the first-person statement by Austen which seems so awkward ("I come now to the relation of a misfortune which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood.") is indeed a piece of patchover work. Austen invents this party in order to explain how the Steeles came to be staying with Fanny Dashwood. They have to stay there in order for her to use Mrs Jennings, John Dashwood's and Nancy Steele's wonderful descriptions of what happened when Nancy told the truth. Austen may have had Elinor and Marianne originally staying with the Middletons while in London; that would explain why Mrs Jennings is often not around in many of the scenes in London."
Good research, Erin.
I gave it a cursory search and didn't find much online, but I'm sure there must be tons written about it, with the book in print for nearly 200 years.
I thought it was odd, but not necessarily jarring. I didn't know whether it was an acceptable storytelling device of the time or just a sign of it being one of her earlier works.
Oh, I forgot about the first paragraph of this post!
It didn't seem that antiquated to me. It definitely doesn't seem any older than it is.
At times the pacing was very measured and the narrator often removed us from the action by describing scenes in a detached fashion, but I thought that fit the novel perfectly.
And I loved the high English sarcasm.
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