Austen’s novel points a humorously accusatory finger at novels that have worked up Catherine’s imagination, but a wider target here is the pleasure people take in having opinions and sharing opinions, most often about other people—and especially in feeling that they know other people better than others do and even better than those other people know themselves. The distinctive fictional device known as free indirect style or free indirect discourse captures the dilemma. Persons in society are continually in the position of talking to one another, having something to say if only by way of rehearsing every news item they’ve read that day. And both gossip and novelistic free indirect style have a tendency to overwrite the thoughts and motives of the persons whom they ventriloquize. Free indirect style, in which a narrator seems to merge with the inner thoughts of the character, participates in an activity of overknowing analogous to the way we overknow political figures or anyone else who counts for us as a public personage.