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Is there a name for this?
In the first few lines of the first chapter of The Professor by Charlotte Brontė there is the following passage:
When I had declined my uncles' offers they asked me "What I intended to do?" I said I should reflect. They reminded me that I had no fortune, and no expectation of any, and, after a considerable pause, Lord Tynedale demanded sternly, "Whether I had thoughts of following my father's steps and engaging in trade?"
The words between the quotation marks are obviously not the actual words the speaker said; they are the meaning of what the speaker said. But the words are within quotations marks. I think that Charlotte Brontė used this 'technique' much more often than Elizabeth Gaskell or Harriet Martineau did. If I wanted to test this hypothesis by counting, what would I be counting? Is there a name for putting a speaker's meaning in quotations marks rather than the actual words the speaker would have said?
And why would a writer do it anyway? The words would convey exactly the same meaning if the quotation and question marks were left out.
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