Charles Brockden Brown made one truly original contribution to the writing of fiction: the extensive representation of figural consciousness (as well as speech) in first-person narratives through free indirect discourse (style indirect libre, erlebte Rede). Judging by published evidence, this phenomenon appears to have remained unnoticed by his contemporaries and by successive generations of critics alike. The problem to be investigated in this paper: how will a translator cope with a narrative device such as grammatically and syntactically marked free indirect discourse in the first person, which has not been described by grammarians, and which has no established precedents in the source literature or in the target literature?