Jane Austen often focalises the third-person narrative of Pride and Prejudice through the viewpoint of the perceptive heroine. This use of free indirect discourse anticipates the signature stream of consciousness technique associated with the twentieth-century modernist Virginia Woolf by two centuries. In the absence of tell-tale tags such as ‘thought Elizabeth’, the reader gains access to the protagonist’s private thoughts and feelings and is nudged to share them. In the novel’s final chapter, however, rather than employing Elizabeth as the narrative centre of consciousness, Austen offers an omniscient glimpse into the futures of the major characters.
In Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) the governess Miss Prism’s simplistic schema of rewards and punishments means that her ‘three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality’ ends highly conventionally: ‘the good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’ (Act III). Despite Chapter 61’s straightforward list-like pattern, however, Austen rounds off her own ‘light and bright and sparkling’ social comedy much more subtly. Her conclusion is both narratively satisfying and technically complex.
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