It is a truth quite infrequently acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third of our material was not really there. Common prepositions, conjunctions, personal pronouns, and articles, and the verb-forms "was", "be", and "had", make up such a proportion of each of Jane Austen's novels. There is no doubt that a roughly similar proportion exists in the work of many other English novelists. John Burrows shows that in the drawing of character in Jane Austen's writings very common words prove to be intrinsically revealing.
I've included this because Tom Zille (2021) mentions that in Heyer's work
The balance between narrative and dialogue is somewhat more ‘successful’, if we assume that the adaptation of Austen’s syntax was indeed Heyer’s goal. As John Burrows has shown in his corpus-based analysis of Austen, dialogue and narrative (in terms of their word count) achieve an almost equal footing in Emma; one of the novels he uses for comparison, Heyer’s Frederica (of 1965, also a late work), comes close to achieving the same equilibrium. (196)
and
Burrows, in his examination of Frederica, finds that ‘“character narrative” [the term he uses for free indirect discourse] can scarcely be distinguished from dialogue except in its observance of the forms of indirect speech’. (198)
It therefore seems that this book contains some significant data concerning Heyer's work.
Here's an abstract:
I've included this because Tom Zille (2021) mentions that in Heyer's work
and
It therefore seems that this book contains some significant data concerning Heyer's work.