Free Indirect Speech Containing Welsh English Literary Dialect and Various Non-Standards in Anna Maria Bennett’s <em>Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel</em>

Anna Maria Bennett’s novel, Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794) was published seventeen years before Jane Austen’s first novel and thirty-four years before T. J. L. Prichard’s The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti, and contains free indirect speech (FIS) and Welsh English (WelE) literary dialect. Austen and Prichard are considered pioneers of FIS and WelE, respectively, in the British novel. However, recent research has demonstrated significant evidence of earlier use of both forms. Bennett is one of these early authors. She uses both FIS and WelE and was widely read in the decades prior to Austen and Prichard. Indeed, Bennett may be one of the first writers, if not the first, to use WelE to signal FIS. Her FIS and WelE literary dialect are features specifically of the ‘barbarous jargon’ of the Welsh servant character, Winifred Griffiths. Metalinguistically, how Bennett uses these two features in Winifred’s speech creates a sociohistorical picture of the author’s own linguistic biases during the early years of the novel form.