Emma

By Jane Austen

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading.

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an 'imaginist', 'on fire with speculation and foresight'. She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married.

Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective. Judgement and imagination are matched in games the reader too can enjoy, and the end is a triumph of understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848703568

Jane Austen

Born in 1775, Jane Austen published four of her six novels anonymously. Her work was not widely read until the late nineteenth century, and her fame grew from then on. Known for her wit and sharp insight into social conventions, her novels about love, relationships, and society are more popular year after year. She has earned a place in history as one of the most cherished writers of English literature.

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Trayler

general introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free Introductions and to provide Notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser:

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College,

University of Kent at Canterbury

introduction

Emma, published in December 1815 and dedicated (reluctantly, but by invitation) to the Prince Regent, is the product of an accomplished novelist who is also a forty-year-old unmarried woman of limited means living in a society where marriage, and not a writer’s career, is every woman’s expected path to success. This is a novel like all Jane Austen’s, contained within a social setting, and leading towards that wedding where ‘perfect happiness’ is to be found; it is, like Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice, ‘light, bright, and sparkling’ in tone; but it is also, like Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, alert to different currents within experience, and particularly those liable to confront women. The formal qualities of the text – including the distinctive attributes of its heroine, and the fine control of the narrative voice – constitute a work of art whose own self-consciousness creates a witty aesthetic image of the ‘understanding’ which lies at the heart of its themes.

Responses to Emma have registered both its sparkle and something more constrained, though rarely with the exact poise of the original. Early readers praised its fidelity to life, like the novelist Susan Ferrier in 1816, who found it ‘excellent’, or Sir Walter Scott, who claims, ‘We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality’ (Quarterly Review, March 1816). Or, like Charlotte Brontë, they belittled those same achievements: ‘She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well’ (letter to W. S. Williams, 1850). Amongst critics of our own time, Marilyn Butler (in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 1975) recognised the importance of that ‘surface’, which substantiates the context of Emma: not merely the world of the novel, but that of its production and reception, both in social and historical and also in literary terms. This apparent order belongs to a world of shifting social and economic structures, where unrest in revolutionary France had suggested the terrible possibilities of radical change; a world too where gothic horror and romantic sensibilities might subvert the eighteenth-century aesthetic of rational proportion. Through fidelity to detail, Austen proposes a picture of more than superficial accuracy: one revealing the deeper values, the structures of meaning and interpretation, that operate within the fictive space but also emerge from it in reading to challenge the audience. Feminist criticism, following the lead of Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar (in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979), has focused particularly on fissures in the text betraying those aspects of a woman’s experience, the ‘days of insignificance and evil’ (Emma, p. 325), that are glossed over by the dominant ‘patriarchal’ ideology of Austen’s day. Yet it is important also to see how far the author exploits what she attacks, and how she enjoys the propensity of the novel form for confusion and mixed emotions as well as clarity and understanding.

Jane Austen herself refers playfully to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in her work. She toys with the literary excesses of Gothic Romance, most ludicrously in the spoof ‘elopement’ scene conducted between Mr Elton and Emma in the carriage at walking pace half a mile from home. Toned-down echoes of epistolary form are incorporated in Robert Martin’s proposal, Frank Churchill’s explanatory letter, and even in Jane Fairfax’s reckless walking through the rain to collect her mail. Mrs Elton is a fount of inept and clichéd quotations from poetry and prose. So, for example, she utterly undoes the force of an allusion to John Gay’s Fables by the way she parades her knowledge: ‘ Let us be discreet – quite on our good behaviour. Hush! You remember those lines – I forget the poem at this moment: ‘For when a lady’s in the case, You know, all other things give place’ ’ (Emma, p. 365). In such literary play, if Jane Austen’s purpose is more pointed than the ‘miniature delicacy’ Charlotte Brontë supposed, it is equally skilful, though perhaps more varied and more boisterously entertaining. Besides literary models, the novel invokes the visual arts in Emma’s watercolours, music via Jane Fairfax’s piano and her duets with Frank Churchill, dance and the diversions of formal dinner parties, picnics, and excursions. Word games also figure in the text, from Harriet’s collection of conundrums to play with the children’s alphabet or the demand for clever nonsense at Box Hill. Backgammon, piquet, quadrille and whist are amongst the games of skill and chance (some two-handed, some played in pairs) which entertain Mr Woodhouse whilst Emma indulges her own preference for matchmaking. Cards, indeed, supply a specialised vocabulary of terms in this novel to counterpoint the ‘liberal’ language of ‘understanding’: a catalogue of stratagems, trickery and deceit, from finessing to double-dealing, which are, in Mr Knightley’s words, ‘ Playing a most dangerous game ’ (p. 358).

Nevertheless, a game this is, and one which works essentially within the rules, not quite transgressing them. This is how the novel can enjoy and exploit even whilst critiquing a highly structured society depicted within a sophisticated literary form. Are the characters playing games or functioning as counters? Where does the narrator stand in this, or the reader? Despite the distinction of aesthetic form, which seems to surround the novel with privilege, rather as Emma herself is beyond criticism by all but Mr Knightley, this work engages very interestingly with the issues of subjectivity and agency, independence and responsibility, which are important preoccupations in current criticism. If such concerns of moral philosophy and aesthetics seem remote from the polish and containment of the novel, or perhaps too solemn, Jane Austen’s ironic technique in Emma persistently encourages readers to work through ‘blunders’ and ‘blindness’ towards understanding.

Miss Woodhouse is mistress of her home and her village but not quite mistress of her own imagination. Indeed, her fancies are sometimes conceived as independent entities intent on mischief: as in the case of ‘an ingenious and animating suspicion entering Emma’s brain with regard to Jane Fairfax, this charming Mr Dixon, and the not going to Ireland’ (p. 125). Yet Emma’s distinctive consciousness is aligned with the central thrust of the novel, if not quite at the same angle as the narrator’s, author’s or reader’s. The text makes its points through structural, narrative and stylistic means, using a highly organised cast of comparable characters, parallel plots and ironic linguistic play to trace the theme of interpretation. At the same time, the novel wittily explores, through the heroine’s conjectures and errors as well as her personal experiences, the processes of story telling and story reading, the pleasures of conscious life. Her projects for Harriet, her suspicions of Jane Fairfax, and her sharing in the Westons’ expectations of a relationship between Miss Woodhouse and Frank Churchill, all exemplify this. As an ‘imaginist’ Emma indulges in a series of fanciful games which are in effect a version of the novelist’s and the reader’s manoeuvres with the text, and have their own pastiche from the interfering Mrs Elton: projecting plot, reading character, enjoying complications and regretting mistakes. Northanger Abbey contains a famous defence of the genre as ‘in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’; but the whole of Emma may be read as an expert commentary on the business of the novel, its pleasures, its workings and the risks it may involve.

Control and chaos both contribute to this quality in Emma: a confident knowingness which is always liable to be surprised. The best way to analyse this effect is by comparing a naïve first reading, when we respond to events with much the same excitement and astonishment as Emma herself, with a later reading where our surprise is displaced into the curiosity of seeing how Emma has been mistaken, without absolute deceit in the narrative, thanks to the careful deployment of ambiguity. This is Jane Austen’s ironic method: yet it does not lead to sneering superiority, for what it explores is a mutual relationship between imagination and judgement, spectatorship and understanding. Emma echoes the novelist in making fanciful projections while we follow her in forming an audience. Each of the parties to this process might overstep or fall short of the mark. Emma’s distinctive and charming quality is the resilience with which she picks herself up when she does so, and starts again.

Repetition with variation in the plot structure is just one of the strong patterns which set the conditions, but not the value, of meaning in Emma: a clearly demarcated scale of differences. Society is hierarchical; characters, and even places, are ranked as formally as the suits of court and common cards in a pack or the double set of inner and outer spaces on the backgammon board, according to rules which everyone here accepts, but the novel itself exposes to investigation. In the cultural geography encoding this world London, Bath, Clifton, Bristol, Birmingham have descending notations dependent on their remoteness from vulgar commerce. Even the merits of various seaside bathing places are debated. Within the environs of Highbury, a small country town, the standings of Donwell Abbey, Hartfield, Randalls, are beyond dispute.

At Highbury, Emma is the leading lady. Yet ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ (p. 1) as she is, her attributes invite comparison with someone of much lower standing, Miss Bates, who ‘enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married’ (p. 14). Austen’s verbal parallel, spaced over two chapters, picks up the pattern of social hierarchy but does not endorse it. No one lives independent of her social context, yet neither is she determined by it. The nature of character is a complex construction. Indeed, Emma’s attitude to Miss Bates is one of the bench marks of her own moral topography (metaphorically lowest with her sarcasm high on Box Hill), for this regard indicates an ethical sense operating in sympathy with her imagination, to recognise values beyond worldly ‘consequence’.

Emma’s status is established through a series of analogues: with poor Miss Taylor, now Mrs Weston, who leads the way to matrimony even before the opening of the novel, and with her own sister, Isabella, married to Mr John Knightley; with the spinster Miss Bates, and her niece Jane Fairfax, who excels Emma in so many accomplishments, though she lacks both her wealth and her ready warmth; with little Harriet Smith, ripe for patronage, and the awful Mrs Elton, eager to patronise. It is in this network of comparisons and contrasts that Emma’s qualities, and specifically those fitting her for marriage, are both highlighted and evaluated.

Similarly amongst the men, Mr Knightley at Donwell heads Highbury’s most distinguished family. Though Mr Woodhouse’s wealth is not of such lineage, his gentility is assured in his ‘valetudinarian’ retirement from the world. Mr Weston, formerly Captain Weston of the Militia, has earned his ease. Mr Elton must maintain his living as a clergyman and boost his standing by marriage to a wealthy woman. Mr Cole, having prospered in trade, must pause before inviting Miss Woodhouse to dinner. Mr Robert Martin is of yeoman stock. So the populus of Highbury and its environs falls neatly into ‘gentlemen and half-gentlemen’ (p. 156), yeomen, tradesmen and those beneath the social notice of the privileged: though they too, like James the coachman or Donwell’s William Larkins, have a clear place in the novel world.

It is the business of marriage to negotiate social distinctions appropriately, while romance experiments with fanciful match-making. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Emma traces ‘the course of true love’ through the excitements of imagination and follies of fancy (Mrs Elton, like Titania, even longs for a donkey!), using three or four couples of distinct social classes and flirting with exchanges amongst them, only to arrive eventually at a resolution that confirms due order. This may be the desired end, but both anticipation and diversions from it are of equal importance to the novel, where an interplay and counterpoint of right thinking and second guessing provoke active involvement, not for Emma only, but in the reading process.

The vocabulary of understanding is pre-eminent in narrative, thought and conversation. Emma is ‘clever’ (p. 1), Mr Knightley ‘sensible’ (p. 4), Miss Taylor ‘intelligent, well-informed, useful’ (p. 2), ‘well-judging and truly amiable’ (p. 10). By contrast, ‘Harriet certainly was not clever’ (p. 18) and Emma (as we infer from the narrative tone) congratulates herself that ‘strength of understanding must not be expected’ (p. 18). Another ‘fanciful’ set of terms swerves ‘playfully’ from judgement towards the ‘lucky guess’ (p. 8). There are ‘odd humours’ (p. 3), ‘in joke’ (p. 5), ‘luck’ and ‘talent’ (p. 8), ‘caprice’ and ‘lively curiosity’ (p. 11) and ‘kind designs’ (p. 18). While Mr Woodhouse believes, ‘ Whatever you say always comes to pass ’ (p. 6) and Harriet cries, with unwitting irony, ‘ Whatever you say is always right . . . and therefore I suppose, and believe, and hope it must be so; but otherwise I could not have imagined it ’ (p. 59), Mr Knightley is unimpressed with Emma’s powers of divination: ‘ Not I, indeed. I only name possibilities. I do not pretend to Emma’s genius for foretelling and guessing ’ (p. 28). It is Mr Knightley who perceives that ‘ Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally ’ (p. 51).

Through Emma, a sequence of fanciful romances are dreamt up, brought to a crisis and abandoned: only to be substituted by those she has not foreseen. The novel circles repeatedly through anticipation, confrontation and self-correction, always addressing the ironic gap between Emma’s guesswork and a better informed reading of the telling signs which set apart scene and subtext, betraying dramas of experience which lie beyond her control. Thus when Emma fabricates a romance between Jane Fairfax and her best friend’s husband she has the misfortune (and later mortification) to develop her suspicions with none other than the real secret lover: an irony underlined by her overconfident cry: ‘ "You may say what you choose, but your countenance testifies that your thoughts on this subject are very much like mine" ’ (p. 172). Emma’s moments of fancy are both counterpointed and complemented by her self-analysis in response to failure. Sometimes the cycle is comically speedy. ‘Concerned and ashamed’ at the pain she has caused Harriet over Mr Elton, Emma immediately wonders whether William Coxe might not suit her better, and has to ‘blush and laugh at her own relapse’ (p. 109). Overcome by Harriet’s ‘simplicity and modesty’, Emma momentarily thinks her ‘the superior creature’ – though the narrator is at hand with a healthy dose of scepticism at what is after all only a new fancy: ‘It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life’ (p. 113–4). Imagination, after all, is just as important to the novel as fine feelings, or even good judgement.

Emma learns, not cumulatively through her sequence of mistakes, but rather by analogy. When Harriet declares her highest aspirations, Emma is shocked into taking a detached view of the situation and her own part in it. Indeed, the culminating insight, ‘It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’ (p. 328) though arriving in a metaphor that mischievously recalls Cupid’s antics, continues in the third-person diction of reported speech, indicating a level of measured detachment. How far this oblique style conveys Emma’s own thoughts and how far we are reading the narrator cannot be determined grammatically. Language and style work here like a transparent medium which may yet give a particular slant to the object of vision. This is why our ‘experienced reading’ of the novel pays attention not only to words but also to meaning encoded in a wide variety of sign systems, which may point the way through ironic ambiguity towards understanding.

The episode of Harriet’s portrait illustrates brilliantly how Jane Austen’s narrative can incorporate both ‘language’ and ‘style’ from the non-verbal arts into the text, playing with processes of translation from one sign system to another, to highlight the necessity of interpretation to arrive at understanding. First, the novel prepares readers (but not, significantly, Emma herself) to register issues of language and meaning, and the comical possibility of a gap between them, during a conversation between Mrs Weston and Mr Knightley about Emma’s new friendship with Harriet. ‘ They will read together. She means it, I know,’ says the former governess; but Mr Knightley’s retort exposes such ‘meaning’ to sceptical attention: ‘ Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. ’ He goes on, with a kind of poststructuralist excess, mocking Emma’s own extravagance of intentions: ‘ I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up, at various times, of books that she meant to read regularly through – and very good lists they were, very well chosen, and very neatly arranged – sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule ’ (p. 27). ‘Drawing’ slips almost unnoticed into this archive of intentions in the comically debased sense of ‘drawing-up lists’. Equally casually, it seems, the conversation moves on to Emma’s looks, as ‘the picture of health’ (p. 29); and then Mrs Weston affirms. ‘ With all dear Emma’s little faults . . . he has qualities which may be trusted; she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder ’ (p. 29). Meaning, reading, drawing and Emma’s loveliness are linked with ideas of error, however temporary. Yet the narrative conceals the connection between this discussion and the following chapter, as Mrs Weston herself hides certain ‘wishes at Randalls respecting Emma’s destiny’ (p. 30) and the conversation turns to the weather.

Better prepared than Emma herself, the reader can now enjoy not one or two but actually several versions of the portrait episode, indicating the importance of point of view in registering meaning. There is Harriet’s ‘very interesting naiveté’ (p. 32), Mr Elton’s ‘gallant’ superfluity of compliments, which Emma diagnoses and dislikes, but whose direction she mistakes; and there is Mr Knightley’s disinterested criticism. Dominating the narrative, Elton’s stylistic excess is comically mismatched to his subject: ‘exactly so’ the idea of ‘likeness’ is stretched beyond plausibility. Emma’s response divides with comic precision between silent straight talking and polite speech, distinguished for readers not only by the sentiments in question but the marked difference in sentence rhythm: abrupt or extended: ‘Yes, good man! thought Emma, but what has all that to do with taking likenesses? You know nothing of drawing. Don’t pretend to be in raptures about mine. Keep your raptures for Harriet’s face. Well, if you give me such kind encouragement, Mr Elton, I believe I shall try what I can do ’ (p. 32). When the portrait is done, criticism centres tellingly on ‘the expression of the eye’ (p. 36). Then Mr Knightley pronounces, ‘ You have made her too tall, Emma. ’ Emma ‘knew that she had, but would not own it’, while Mr Elton produces a rhapsodic defence whose style anticipates impressionism with its verbal brushstrokes sketching an effect rather than describing the object, as conventional syntax gives way to a gasping catalogue of incomplete clauses: ‘Oh no – certainly not too tall – not in the least too tall. Consider, she is sitting down, which naturally presents a different – which in short gives exactly the idea – and the proportions must be preserved, you know. Proportions, fore-shortening – oh no! it gives one exactly the idea of such a height as Miss Smith’s – exactly so, indeed.’

Such stylistic markers are unmissable. Mrs Elton outdoes her mate with her vulgarisms, and excess. Her weak judgement takes a geometrical spin when she envisions Jane Fairfax’s ‘situation’ with the Sucklings: ‘Delightful, charming, superior, first circles, spheres, lines, ranks, everything’ (p. 290). The narrator teasingly adopts a similar ‘catalogue’ style in reporting Emma’s response to a nearer threat, Harriet’s encounter with the travellers, and rescue by Frank Churchill. This, however, though extravagant is not ungrammatical. Indeed, it exhibits the rhetoric of argument, until the tell-tale coda, moving towards Emma’s focalisation (a term coined by the French theorist Gerard Genette to distinguish between the one who sees and the one who narrates a story): ‘Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together . . . How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight? especially with such a groundwork of anticipation as her mind had already made’ (p. 270). ‘On fire’ gives warning. The word ‘speculation’ shifts from a scientific meaning to a metaphorical one: from sight to gambling. ‘Groundwork’ is a term from painting which might recall the portrait débâcle. The clues are here for clarity, but so is the lure of romance. It is hardly surprising that despite Emma’s resolution to have it out with Harriet, since ‘Plain dealing was always best’ (275), both bring their unspoken expectations to the conversation, and a simple pronoun ambiguity over who ‘he’ is confirms both in error. To Emma, ‘he’ is obviously Frank Churchill; to Harriet, Mr Knightley, who danced with her at the Crown.

Mr Knightley, like the reader, observes signs that Emma misses and infers different agendas; yet even he is not infallible, for observation cannot quite be neutral. ‘In this state of schemes and hopes, and connivance’ (p. 276) dazzling Highbury, he notices ‘some inclination to trifle’ between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. Here the narrative reports Mr Knightley’s thoughts, presenting his suspicion, itself under suspicion of partiality. The text performs a delicate manoeuvre, tiptoeing between two romantic secrets without absolutely giving the game away. ‘He could not understand it; but there were symptoms of intelligence between them – he thought so at least – symptoms of admiration on his side, which, having once observed, he could not persuade himself to think entirely devoid of meaning, however he might wish to escape any of Emma’s errors of imagination’ (p. 276). The vocabulary is almost forensic, repeating the quasi-clinical term ‘symptoms’, while ‘intelligence’ suggests espionage. Yet the sentence structure, long and hesitant, recoils repeatedly from Mr Knightley’s inference, in a syntactical expression of dismay. The ‘private understanding’ he suspects is an affront to society and to reason.

The novel’s diagnosis of such ‘symptoms’ is, however, not so dire. Remember those ‘really good enigmas, charades or conundrums’ transcribed in Harriet’s collection, ‘the only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life’ (p. 55): how they foxed Harriet and threw Emma off the scent of Mr Elton’s pursuit. Think of Frank Churchill disguising his blunder over the plans for Mr Perry’s carriage as ‘a dream’, and how Mr Weston responds: ‘ What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream! And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is! ’ (p. 278) – a comment with the added piquancy of an irreverent authorial reference to Shakespeare’s comedy.

Certainly, Emma’s confrontation with her own mistakes is painful: ‘Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be a matter of humiliation to her’ (p. 331). The ultimate surprise of Mr Knightley’s proposal, however, is triumphant. At last the novel allows Emma relief, although even here ‘The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream was perhaps the most prominent feeling’ (p. 344). The way is clear to resolution, when ‘the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions’ of true friends are to be ‘fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union’ (p. 390). Even at this period of expectations fulfilled and the perfection of the pattern, however, as Emma is engaged to Mr Knightley, Harriet to Robert Martin, Jane Fairfax to Frank Churchill, though the paradigm of union dominates the plot, the novel preserves something different. In the scene of declaration between Emma and Mr Knightley, the narrator teasingly withholds explicit detail. ‘What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does’ (p. 346). For her heroine, as for the narrator, the ‘exact truth’ has a certain restraint. ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material’ (p. 347). So the anticipated ‘happy ending’ refuses closure, completion, and turns instead towards something unutterable, something understood.

Nicola Bradbury

University of Reading

further reading

David Aers, Jonathon Cook and David Punter (eds), Romanticism and Ideology: Studies in English Writing 1765–1830, Routledge, London 1981

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford University Press, New York 1987

Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye, Oxford University Press, 1995

Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1979

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1975

Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, tr. Jane E. Lewin, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1980

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven 1979

J. David Grey (ed.), The Jane Austen Companion, Macmillan, New York 1986

Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Cambridge University Press, 1989

Jan Littlewood (ed.), Jane Austen: Critical Assessments, 4 vols, Helm Information, 1998

David Monaghan, Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision, Macmillan, London 1980

Mary Poovey: The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, Chicago University Press, 1984

Brian Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols, Routledge, London 1968

Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, Macmillan, London 1986

Ian Watt (ed.), Critical Essays on Jane Austen, Prentice-Hall, London 1963

Chapter 1

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgement, but directed chiefly by her own.

The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself: these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Sorrow came – a gentle sorrow – but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness. Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over, and the bride people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.

The event had every promise of happiness for her friend. Mr Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age, and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning’s work for her. The want of Miss Taylor would be felt every hour of every day. She recalled her past kindness – the kindness, the affection of sixteen years – how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old – how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health – and how nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood. A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the intercourse of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon followed Isabella’s marriage, on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection. It had been a friend and companion such as few possessed: intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, knowing all the ways of the family, interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of hers – one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and who had such an affection for her as could never find fault.

How was she to bear the change? It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.

The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian¹ all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.

Her sister, though comparatively but little removed by matrimony, being settled in London, only sixteen miles off, was much beyond her daily reach; and many a long October and November evening must be struggled through at Hartfield, before Christmas brought the next visit from Isabella and her husband, and their little children, to fill the house, and give her pleasant society again.

Highbury, the large and populous village almost amounting to a town, to which Hartfield, in spite of its separate lawn, and shrubberies, and name, did really belong, afforded her no equals. The Woodhouses were first in consequence there. All looked up to them. She had many acquaintances in the place, for her father was universally civil, but not one among them who could be accepted in lieu of Miss Taylor for even half a day. It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it, and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful. His spirits required support. He was a nervous man, easily depressed; fond of everybody that he was used to, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind. Matrimony, as the origin of change, was always disagreeable; and he was by no means yet reconciled to his own daughter’s marrying, nor could ever speak of her but with compassion, though it had been entirely a match of affection, when he was now obliged to part with Miss Taylor too; and from his habits of gentle selfishness, and of being never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself, he was very much disposed to think Miss Taylor had done as sad a thing for herself as for them, and would have been a great deal happier if she had spent all the rest of her life at Hartfield. Emma smiled and chatted as cheerfully as she could, to keep him from such thoughts; but when tea came, it was impossible for him not to say exactly as he had said at dinner.

‘Poor Miss Taylor! I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr Weston ever thought of her!’

‘I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot. Mr Weston is such a good-humoured, pleasant, excellent man, that he thoroughly deserves a good wife; and you would not have had Miss Taylor live with us for ever, and bear all my odd humours, when she might have a house of her own?’

‘A house of her own! but where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large; and you have never any odd humours, my dear.’

‘How often we shall be going to see them, and they coming to see us! We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay our wedding-visit² very soon.’

‘My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far.’

‘No, papa; nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure.’

‘The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way; and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?’

‘They are to be put into Mr Weston’s stable, papa. You know we have settled all that already. We talked it all over with Mr Weston last night. And as for James, you may be very sure he will always like going to Randalls, because of his daughter’s being housemaid there. I only doubt whether he will ever take us anywhere else. That was your doing, papa. You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her – James is so obliged to you!’

‘I am very glad I did think of her. It was very lucky, for I would not have had poor James think himself slighted upon any account; and I am sure she will make a very good servant; she is a civil, pretty-spoken girl; I have a great opinion of her. Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way, and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant; and it will be a great comfort to poor Miss Taylor to have somebody about that she is used to see. Whenever James goes over to see his daughter, you know, she will be hearing of us. He will be able to tell her how we all are.’

Emma spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas, and hoped, by the help of backgammon,³ to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own. The backgammon-table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary.

Mr Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it, as the elder brother of Isabella’s husband. He lived about a mile from Highbury, was a frequent visitor, and always welcome, and at this time more welcome than usual, as coming directly from their mutual connections in London. He had returned to a late dinner after some days’ absence, and now walked up to Hartfield to say that all were well in Brunswick Square. It was a happy circumstance, and animated Mr Woodhouse for some time. Mr Knightley had a cheerful manner, which always did him good; and his many inquiries after ‘poor Isabella’ and her children were answered most satisfactorily. When this was over, Mr Woodhouse gratefully observed:

‘It is very kind of you, Mr Knightley, to come out at this late hour to call upon us. I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk.’

‘Not at all, sir. It is a beautiful moonlight night; and so mild that I must draw back from your great fire.’

‘But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold.’

‘Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them.’

‘Well, that is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding.’

‘By the bye, I have not wished you joy. Being pretty well aware of what sort of joy you must both be feeling, I have been in no hurry with my congratulations; but I hope it all went off tolerably well. How did you all behave? Who cried most?’

‘Ah! poor Miss Taylor! ’tis a sad business.’

‘Poor Mr and Miss Woodhouse, if you please; but I cannot possibly say poor Miss Taylor. I have a great regard for you and Emma; but when it comes to the question of dependence or independence! at any rate, it must be better to have only one to please than two.’

‘Especially when one of those two is such a fanciful, troublesome creature!’ said Emma playfully. ‘That is what you have in your head, I know – and what you would certainly say if my father were not by.’

‘I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed,’ said Mr Woodhouse, with a sigh. ‘I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome.’

‘My dearest papa! You do not think I could mean you, or suppose Mr Knightley to mean you. What a horrible idea! Oh, no! I meant only myself. Mr Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know – in a joke – it is all a joke. We always say what we like to one another.’

Mr Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them; and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would be so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by everybody.

‘Emma knows I never flatter her,’ said Mr Knightley, ‘but I meant no reflection on anybody. Miss Taylor has been used to have two persons to please; she will now have but one. The chances are that she must be a gainer.’

‘Well,’ said Emma, willing to let it pass, ‘you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly. Everybody was punctual, everybody in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen. Oh, no; we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and were sure of meeting every day.’

‘Dear Emma bears everything so well,’ said her father. ‘But, Mr Knightley, she is really very sorry to lose poor Miss Taylor, and I am sure she will miss her more than she thinks for.’

Emma turned away her head, divided between tears and smiles.

‘It is impossible that Emma should not miss such a companion,’ said Mr Knightley. ‘We should not like her so well as we do, sir, if we could suppose it: but she knows how much the marriage is to Miss Taylor’s advantage; she knows how very acceptable it must be, at Miss Taylor’s time of life, to be settled in a home of her own, and how important to her to be secure of a comfortable provision, and therefore cannot allow herself to feel so much pain as pleasure. Every friend of Miss Taylor must be glad to have her so happily married.’

‘And you have forgotten one matter of joy to me,’ said Emma, ‘and a very considerable one – that I made the match myself. I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said Mr Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for anything.’

Mr Knightley shook his head at her. Her father fondly replied, ‘Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretell things, for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches.’

‘I promise you to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world! And after such success, you know! Everybody said that Mr Weston would never marry again. Oh dear, no! Mr Weston who had been a widower so long, and who seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife, so constantly occupied either in his business in town or among his friends here, always acceptable wherever he went, always cheerful – Mr Weston need not spend a single evening in the year alone if he did not like it. Oh no! Mr Weston certainly would never marry again. Some people even talked of a promise to his wife on her deathbed, and others of the son and the uncle not letting him. All manner of solemn nonsense was talked on the subject, but I believed none of it. Ever since the day (about four years ago) that Miss Taylor and I met with him in Broadway Lane, when, because it began to mizzle, he darted away with so much gallantry, and borrowed two umbrellas for us from Farmer Mitchell’s, I made up my mind on the subject. I planned the match from that hour; and when such success has blessed me in this instance, dear papa, you cannot think that I shall leave off match-making.’

‘I do not understand what you mean by success,’ said Mr Knightley. ‘Success supposes endeavour. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind! but if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr Weston were to marry her, and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards – why do you talk of success? where is your merit? What are you proud of? You made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be said.’

‘And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? I pity you. I thought you cleverer; for, depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it. And as to my poor word success, which you quarrel with, I do not know that I am so entirely without any claim to it. You have drawn two pretty pictures; but I think there may be a third – a something between the do-nothing and the do-all. If I had not promoted Mr Weston’s visits here, and given many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to anything after all. I think you must know Hartfield enough to comprehend that.’

‘A straightforward, open-hearted man like Weston, and a rational, unaffected woman like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference.’

‘Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others,’ rejoined Mr Woodhouse, understanding but in part. ‘But, my dear, pray do not make any more matches; they are silly things, and break up one’s family circle grievously.’

‘Only one more, papa; only for Mr Elton. Poor Mr Elton! You like Mr Elton, papa; I must look about for a wife for him. There is nobody in Highbury who deserves him – and he has been here a whole year, and has fitted up his house so comfortably, that it would be a shame to have him single any longer; and I thought when he was joining their hands today, he looked so very much as if he would like to have the same kind office done for him! I think very well of Mr Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service.’

‘Mr Elton is a very pretty young man, to be sure, and a very good young man, and I have great regard for him. But if you want to show him any attention, my dear, ask him to come and dine with us some day. That will be a much better thing. I dare say Mr Knightley will be so kind as to meet him.’

‘With a great deal of pleasure, sir, at any time,’ said Mr Knightley, laughing: ‘and I agree with you entirely that it will be a much better thing. Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven-and-twenty can take care of himself.’

Chapter 2

Mr Weston was a native of Highbury, and born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property. He had received a good education, but, on succeeding early in life to a small independence, had become indisposed for any of the more homely pursuits in which his brothers were engaged; and had satisfied an active, cheerful mind and social temper by entering into the militia of his county, then embodied.⁴

Captain Weston was a general favourite; and when the chances of his military life had introduced him to Miss Churchill, of a great Yorkshire family, and Miss Churchill fell in love with him, nobody was surprised, except her brother and his wife, who had never seen him, and who were full of pride and importance, which the connection would offend.

Miss Churchill, however, being of age, and with the full command of her fortune⁵ – though her fortune bore no proportion to the family estate – was not to be dissuaded from the marriage, and it took place, to the infinite mortification of Mr and Mrs Churchill, who threw her off with due decorum. It was an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness. Mrs Weston ought to have found more in it, for she had a husband whose warm heart and sweet temper made him think everything due to her in return for the great goodness of being in love with him; but though she had one sort of spirit, she had not the best. She had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasonable anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home. They lived beyond their income, but still it was nothing in comparison of Enscombe: she did not cease to love her husband; but she wanted at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.

Captain Weston, who had been considered, especially by the Churchills, as making such an amazing match, was proved to have much the worst of the bargain; for when his wife died, after a three years’ marriage, he was rather a poorer man than at first, and with a child to maintain. From the expense of the child, however, he was soon relieved. The boy had, with the additional softening claim of a lingering illness of his mother’s, been the means of a sort of reconciliation; and Mr and Mrs Churchill, having no children of their own, nor any other young creature of equal kindred to care for, offered to take the whole charge of the little Frank soon after her decease. Some scruples and some reluctance the widower-father may be supposed to have felt; but as they were overcome by other considerations, the child was given up to the care and the wealth of the Churchills, and he had only his own comfort to seek, and his own situation to improve as he could.

A complete change of life became desirable. He quitted the militia and engaged

Reviews for Emma

[underthebookpile · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emma is a classic novel that still delights after all this time. It follows the spoilt but well-intentioned titular character as she develops schemes to fix her friends up with suitable husbands. For the most part, they all backfire, leaving some of her acquaintances worse off than they were before. Despite this, you can't help but still like Emma. All of the characters, including her, are very well developed and have humorous quirks and interactions throughout the story. Folks who like the movie "Clueless" might like this book as it is the very closely related basis for the film.

[boundtogetherforgood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emma Woodhouse is 21. She lives with her father and from the age of 12 was raised by him and a live-in governess, Miss Taylor who is now the newly married Mrs. Weston. Emma set things rolling for that romance to take hold; at least she believes she did.Emma has a passion for arranging couples. The book follows her as she sets out to arrange a fitting match for Miss Harriet Smith. Readers either cringe or enjoy the ride as they watch Emma woefully mess up Miss Smith's life for a time.Through all of this Emma avers that she has no intention of every marrying. Of course that stand is well challenged by the end of the book.I very much enjoyed reading this Jane Austen novel. The only other book of hers that I have read is Pride and Prejudice which I loved. P&P was a masterpiece. I feel that Emma was a good book but not as witty or as culturally astute as P&P. I eagerly look forward to reading more of Miss Austen's works.Oh, and I can't step away without saying the Mr. Woodhouse, described at the beginning of the book as a "valetudinarian:a person who is excessively concerned about his or her poor health or ailments" really got on my nerves!

[ainjel-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Honestly I found this to be one of the harder Austen novels to read. The plot wasn't as captivating as some of her other works, nor were the characters as interesting. Mr. Knightly and Emma are, of course, exceedingly interesting, but everyone else I found rather blah and dull which might have been the point. Emma is an absolute scoundrel and I was constantly reminded of the Austen quote where she tells her sister I believe that Emma is a protagonist only she will like. There are a lot of interesting choices and techniques used in this novel that require some more pondering and close reading, but I will say this: Emma is not the best Austen novel, but it is probably one of the best literary pieces she produced.

All in all, I would recommend this book to the dedicated Austen fans, but I probably wouldn't recommend it as a starter into Jane Austen literature.

[mhanover10 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Maybe I shouldn't have listened to this as an audio book because I found it kind of boring. I'm looking forward to listening to more of her books.

[doingdewey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although Emma isn’t going to displace Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice as my favorite Austen, it was definitely a fun read. The introduction mentions that Emma was Austen’s favorite character she created and I can see why. She’s sometimes naive or snobby, but she’s also cheerful, happy, and concerned with the happiness of others. I thought her father and sister were pretty funny, unique characters as well. The way relationships develop between characters is generally slow, subtle, and believable. The end is a bit abrupt and everything wraps up a bit too neatly, but I was in the mood for a light read and actually liked that the resolution wasn’t drawn out too much. Overall, this was a very fun, light read.

This review first published at Doing Dewey.

[kristykay22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An extremely enjoyable and often hilarious slice of Georgian life featuring the spoiled, snotty, but also weirdly lovable Emma who is very convinced she understands how everyone feels even when she is repeatedly proven wrong (even about herself). Austen has the ability to draw characters that are simultaneously pointed caricatures and lovingly individualistic portraits. It is no wonder she published her novels anonymously during her lifetime, because I'm sure her friends, family, and acquaintances could find themselves in these pages. Not sure how I made it this long without reading this one, but I'm glad I finally did.

[jessiqa_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emma is from the leading family in Highbury, living alone with her widowed father at Hartfield. She loves to play matchmaker, feeling her skills quite superior after her friend's marriage went exactly as she hoped. Now Emma has set her sights on Harriet, a young woman of unknown parentage whom Emma wishes to match with the local vicar. The book is a comedy of misunderstandings and secrets. People often don't talk about how they really feel, leaving things up for interpretation, and often misinterpretation.I really enjoyed Emma. The prose is very simple, making it an easy read. I like that Emma herself is a flawed character who comes to recognize her flaws and works to correct them. Not everyone in the story is as self-aware as she is, and that's part of the fun. Austen created a cast of characters here whom you could easily recognize in real life. (How many of us know a talkative Miss Bates?) It's a romantic comedy where the matchmaker lead has no desire for marriage herself, which is perhaps unusual in this genre (and also serves to make the story more interesting). I wholeheartedly recommend reading Emma. It's a fun, low-stakes comedy, with lovable characters and a happy ending.

[odinblindeye · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not the biggest Jane Austin fan, as I find her subject matter not as engaging as some would have me believe. It's a well written book, and her humor is definitely there, but I just don't get the same feeling from Emma as I did from say, Pride and Prejudice. It was alright, but still, I needed to force myself to finish this one off.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Andermaal is het hoofdthema: misleiding, niets is wat het lijkt. Andermaal happy end. De hoofdfiguur Emma is eigenlijk niet echt sympathiek, eerder meelijwekkend.Wel weer mooi societyportret en vooral enorme psychologische diepgang (in dit opzicht is Austen zelfs een voorloper van Dostojevski). Vlotte dialogen afgewisseld met beschrijving en introspectie. Vormelijk toch wel minder dan P&P, met soms langdradige stukken.

[aeolvey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Love it, love it, love it!

[epictale · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I dallied on purpose through Emma, taking nearly two on-again, off-again months to savor Jane Austen’s delicious prose, her sympathetic and perceptive portrayals of the protagonist and other main characters, and her exquisitely adept, lost-art use of semicolons. I hadn’t expected to discover and enjoy numerous laugh out loud moments, but Austen delivered the goods repeatedly...especially at the expense of pompous Mrs. Elton and hare-brained Miss Bates. Although the social mores of 18C Britain were obviously very different from those of today, Austen conveyed the motivations and behaviors of her characters in a way that modern readers can easily recognize and relate to. Brava!

[homeschoolmimzi · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Boo on this one. I can't believe Emma is a classic. If there were soap operas in the 19th century, this would have made an excellent teleplay for one. There were no noble characters; all were rich gossips overly concerned with complexions, tea time and the weather. Everyone was so afraid of being sick because of drafts, rain, lack of good air, etc.. Also annoying was the tedious length it took someone to express a thought (and not a very worthwhile thought at that). What could be expressed in one sentence took about three paragraphs.
Emma was a rich, spoiled busybody who constantly tried to play matchmaker, and she was horrible at it. That's the basic story. Not worth reading. I was going to read some more Jane Austen but I think I need a break for now.

[sarah1e · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emma is the kind of coming of age story only Jane Austen could produce. Emma Woodhouse seems the perfect young lady; pretty, rich, attentive to her elderly father, polite to all the lesser peoples around her. But she is also as prone to cruelty and silliness as any child. She fancies herself a matchmaker, and makes some efforts at that. Events transpire to bring her back to her senses, and she begins to mature into a sensible woman. What would the moral of the story be? - An Austen heroine always gets her man.

[eilantha_le_fay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I couldn’t help loving this book, even though I already knew the story. Her imagery is so vivid that I felt it as a time machine, transporting me to nineteenth century England, wandering through uncobbled streets and amazing houses with lady friends wearing beautiful dresses. Meeting gentlemen and speaking in a guarded but still meaningful way, minding respect and propriety above everything else. So much fun!Emma is an adorable heroine. It’s lovely to watch her make mistakes and then try to make things right again on her way. It made me realize women (and men) didn’t change so much in almost two hundred years.

[jawalter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

eBook

I really don't know what to say about this. Austen is, as always, a delight to read, and even the fact that you can see what's going to happen from early on in the book (I bet there will be a secret engagement!) doesn't spoil the pleasure.

Emma's a great character if for no other reason than that her flaws actually make her a bad person, which seems strange for what I expect out of an Austen book. The fact that she's redeemed by the end doesn't change the fact that for most of the book, she doesn't seem to deserve the advantages she's been given.

[emcarso1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jane Austen. Enough said - the greatest of romance writers.

[kimmr_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have enjoyed re-reading Emma this time more than I ever have before. Listening to Nadia May's narration of the audiobook no doubt contributed to this. This novel demonstrates Jane Austen's genius: she gives Emma Woodhouse a whole range of faults - including conceit, vanity, pride and immaturity. And yet Emma is real and she is likeable. She makes you cringe, but you cheer for her when she recognises her mistakes and tries to make things right. Other characters are equally masterful: Miss Bates' sympathetic silliness, Mrs Elton's sheer awfulness, Mr Knightley's calm good sense. I love them all, even though spending the afternoon with some of them would be a major trial!

[wodenthewanderer · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not the biggest Jane Austin fan, as I find her subject matter not as engaging as some would have me believe. It's a well written book, and her humor is definitely there, but I just don't get the same feeling from Emma as I did from say, Pride and Prejudice. It was alright, but still, I needed to force myself to finish this one off.

[wildeaboutoscar · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to read this and not compare it to Clueless from time to time, but on the whole I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not Austen's best certainly, but entertaining nonetheless.

[bherner_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Don't get the fuss. Did not enjoy.

[oliviabiba-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Emma Woodhouse is a young girl of 20 (or 21?), beautiful, lovable and therefore loved by everyone surrounding her, rich, socially privileged... The story begins right after her governess' marriage, a match that Emma proud herself of being responsible for. Now she's left alone with her father, a man that very much reminds us of a hobbit when it comes to his way of thinking and behaving, and so she decides to engage herself in matching another couple (she has decided not to ever get marry).

Despite the fact that I usually like Jane Austen's books VERY much and having enjoyed this reading, I do think that Austen should have taken a closer look at how she portraits Emma. Since she's the protagonist, I felt like I should like her, but it was simply impossible to do so. Nevertheless, I found it really hard to sympathize with a girl who's so spoiled (and I failed to understand how she was so very much loved by all the other characters) and by the end of the book I felt happy not for Emma, but for the other characters. But maybe that was the point, maybe that was a way of portraying England's rural society from early 18th century.

Most of the book consists in dialogues, descriptions of daily life in that society and the relationships between the neighbors. Now, talking about a period novel I always find it really hard to reach an equilibrium point between what was the author's view/intention and what is more of a description (yes, I know there's no such a thing as a description totally absent from the author's opinion, but here I'm referring to what was unintentional). After all I'm reading something from two centuries ago so most of what people speak and/or how they speak is different, so how can I know what was common at that time? In general I always think the way they treat each other to be extremely polite, too formal, which presented some kind of challenge at first, but after a while we tend to understand the characters and get used to the way of acting of each one of them.

I believe this to be a good read for those eager to get an idea of habits and society from that time, especially concerning the social position by birth, how people moved within society and the treatment reserved to each one, which was defined not only by wealth, but also by tradition. Tradition, I believe, is the word that best describes England, even now.

[narilka · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although convinced that she herself will never marry, Emma Woodhouse - beautiful, clever, rich and single - imagines herself to be naturally talented in match making. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her friend Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. My only experience with Austen before this was Pride and Prejudice, which I quite enjoyed, so I was surprised by how hard a time I had getting into Emma. The story dragged in the beginning for me and I found myself putting the book down quite often. There was a lack of plot and I found that saw things coming that the characters didn't which made their big reveals have less impact. The other issue I had was with Austen's writing style. Her use of language is beautiful. However, at some points when the story seems to be going very slowly it began to grate on me. She also seemed to do a lot of telling rather than showing. That said, by the third act I finally became more involved with the characters. They are funny, witty, annoying and quite memorable. The social commentary provided by the ladies was an interesting insight into the times back then. Some things are vastly different now and in others things haven't changed all that much. I'm glad I stuck it out.

[hobbitprincess · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A delightful book, if not a little irritating in parts. I've read this at least once before, but it's been a few years. Emma lives with her father and fancies herself a matchmaker who will never marry herself. She learns a few lessons along the way that turn her from a spoiled, annoying young woman to someone who is kind and caring. My only complaint with this book is that Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Elton annoy me to tears. Otherwise, this is a good read.

[lyzzybee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(late 1980s / early 1990s, dated from sticky-backed-plastic covering)How DO you actually review a book by Austen? Hasn’t everything already been said before? This was one of the two least-known of her books to me (the other being “Persuasion”, which I read back in January) but it’s just such a good read, with wonderful characters, and, although I had forgotten much of it, I remembered the well-plotted and satisfying story.As with other classics (see Hardy reads and “Middlemarch“, I have found my reaction to this book changing over time. I found Jane Fairfax unjustly judged now – although that’s obviously part of the story – where I found her annoying before, and I recall being more frustrated with Mr Woodhouse in earlier days – now I can see the worry shining through his dealings with anything at all out of the ordinary, having lost his wife young and only having one daughter left at home. Book blogger Dovegreyreader, who has also recently read and reviewed this book, although for the first time, points out the effects of the loss of her mother on Emma, and you can see that when it’s pointed out to you, with the lack of female guidance (think of Jo from Little Women without her mother) and only her governess to oversee her moral development, someone who is, although full of sense herself, perhaps a little over-indulgent of her dear Emma. And I think that it is to these women of sense, rather than sensibility, that we turn as we get older, isn’t it? Emma perhaps moves from one point to the other over the course of the book, and of course her relationship with Mr Knightley is just perfect! A great read, anyway.

[tehuset · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Det är svårt att tro att man kan bli så intresserad av vardagslivet i ett litet samhälle i 1800-talets England. Men det blir man. Det finns en varm, humoristisk ton genom hela boken som gör den till en riktigt fin läsupplevelse. Bra sommarläsning! "Emma" är en kärlekshistoria men också en utvecklingsroman, där man får följa huvudpersonens mognad till ung kvinna. Mitt bestående intryck är alla de trevliga miljöskildringarna - man går på middag, ställer till med dans, åker på utflykt och går på visiter och promenader. De verkar ha det så trevligt i Highbury!It's hard to believe that you can become so interested in the everyday life in a small town in England, two centuries ago... But it gets you. There is a warm, humorous tone throughout the book that makes it a really nice reading experience. A very good choice for your relaxed summer reading! "Emma" is a love story but also a story where one can follow the main character's maturation into a young woman. My lasting impression is all the nice environment descriptions - you go to dinner, get up to dance, go for trips and walks and visit people. They seem to have such a nice time in Highbury!

[annesanse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After reading and loving Pride and Prejudice, I decided to really take my time with Emma and thought it wouldn't come anywhere close to P&P. I am surprised to say that I liked it even better! Having seen a couple of the video adaptions of this, I was already familiar with the story and knew all the major plot points. What you don't get as well in the movies however is the incredible transformation in Emma's way of thinking. It was so beautifully written and yet was also incredibly funny. I loved every single character (even the annoying ones) for what they brought to the story. Also, Mr. Knightley was just completely wonderful. Overall, I have to say that Emma is my new favorite novel. It had everything I want out of a book.

[steelwhisper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Re-read these days and am still just loving this!

[murphy4jacobs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I remember reading a foreword in my first edition of Emma -- was it by Margaret Drabble? -- where it was mentioned that Jane Austen thought no one would like the character of Emma but herself.

At first, I thought she was right. I didn't much care for Emma the first time I read the book. I occasionally wanted to smack her smug face. I certainly didn't think she deserved Mr. Knightly and sometimes thought a dotty spinsterhood was her appropriate fate.

But I read the book again and I changed my mind.

Emma isn't the most likable of fictional characters, at least at first, but this is what makes her so splendid. She grows during the book -- something that is always an effective part of a novel for me. She makes mistakes and then learns from them (although she does have to make the same mistakes a few times to really get the point, but so many of us do the same). As I read the book again, I realized what irritated me so much about Emma was how very much she resembled me and many people I knew, in that way that seeing your own worst qualities reflected in someone else is irritating like nothing else. Emma is a mirror, and she does not reflect a flattering portrait.

Once you get over that little hurdle, it's a very funny, very clever book. Austen has her sharp, sardonic wit at the ready and she uses it to show us the little micro-environment that is Highbury in great but never dull detail. We see the proud, the foolish, the overly reserved, the overly demonstrative -- and, unusually, a bit of all of these are in Emma. She is a more rounded, complete character than Austen has created in her previous books. By the time I'd finished the second read, I was nearly as fond of Emma as Austen.

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Emma is one of my favorite Jane Austen characters (I think I've raed this one more than P&P). And watching the 2009 Masterpiece Classic version of Emma is so much fun. I love how silly and simple they portray Harriet.

[coffeehag · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book perhaps 20 years ago, and since then I have seen filmed versions of it so many times that I didn't think the book could hold any charm for me any more. How wrong I was! Films can never equal Jane Austen's wit. This book is told with a hilarity that held me transfixed, turning pages. The films canvas many chapters in mere seconds, and they can never capture the thoughts and characters of Austen's figures as the book does. It will not be so long before I read this work again.