Intro
Jane Austen is famous for giving us the very handsome Mr. Darcy. And Emma. And Elizabeth Bennet. All of those heroines and hot heroes in breeches. But she's also famous for something else: she was one of the first writers to develop the "free indirect discourse" style. That's basically when the narrator of the novel tells us things (and thoughts) through the character's point of view, but still, more or less, in the narrator's own language (though this language may be colored by the character's style of thought and speech).
Digital Humanist John. F. Burrows did a computational analysis of the use of certain words in Jane Austen's novels. In his book Computation to Criticism: A Study in Jane Austen's Novels and an Experiment in Method, he identifies some pretty interesting patterns.
Let's look at an example below. Here is Anne, the heroine of Austen's Persuasion, thinking about her flame Captain Wentworth:
Quote
She would have liked to know how he felt as to a meeting. Perhaps indifferent, if indifference could exist under such circumstances. He must be either indifferent or unwilling. Had he wished ever to see her again, he need not have waited till this time; he would have done what she could not but believe that in his place she should have done long ago, when events had been early giving him the independence which alone had been wanting.
Analysis
This passage is a classic example of free indirect discourse: "She would have liked to know how he felt as to a meeting." This sentence is signaling to us that we are entering into Anne's thoughts and emotions, and indeed, the next couple of sentences do give us her thoughts and emotions. Is Wentworth indifferent or unwilling? That's a question that Anne is asking herself, and the narrator is relaying it to us.
When John F. Burrows did a computational analysis of Jane Austen's novels, he discovered that the free indirect discourse style was far more prevalent in her later novels than in her earlier novels. His computational analysis proved this beyond a doubt. What this led Burrows to conclude is that, as Austen developed as a writer, she tended more towards interiority. In other words, she got deeper and deeper into her characters' heads the more she wrote.