Emma

Overview

Emma is Austen’s longest novel and the one she expected people to dislike. She said she was taking a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, and then spent five hundred pages proving she could make you love a young woman who is a snob, a meddler and, twice, genuinely cruel.

The setting is deliberately small. Highbury is a village where almost nothing happens; the events are a ball, a picnic, a piano arriving, and a series of misunderstandings about who is interested in whom. Austen knew what she was doing with the scale, describing her own work as a little bit of ivory two inches wide, worked on with a fine brush.

What makes it extraordinary is the narration. Austen had been developing free indirect style for years, and here it runs almost continuously: the prose slides into Emma’s thoughts without quotation marks or any signal, so that her opinions arrive with the authority of the narrator’s voice. When Emma decides that Jane Fairfax is reserved and probably concealing something discreditable, the sentence sounds like information. It is a symptom.

The consequence is that Emma is a mystery novel you do not know you are reading. There is a secret engagement running underneath the whole book, every piece of evidence for it is on the page, and Emma explains all of it away.

What happens

Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one, handsome, clever and rich, and has just lost her governess and closest companion to marriage. Left with a hypochondriac father who dislikes change of any kind, she decides that arranging the marriage was her doing, and that she has a gift for it.

Her new project is Harriet Smith, a pretty, agreeable and not very bright girl of unknown parentage at the local school. Harriet has an offer from Robert Martin, a respectable young farmer she likes. Emma persuades her that he is beneath her and that the vicar, Mr Elton, is interested. Mr Knightley, the family friend who is sixteen years older and the one person who argues with Emma, tells her plainly that she is doing damage. They quarrel.

Mr Elton has in fact been courting Emma the whole time. He makes this clear in a carriage, drunk, and is refused, and comes back from Bath a few weeks later with a wife: Augusta Elton, one of the great comic monsters in English, who talks about her brother-in-law’s estate and his barouche-landau within four minutes of meeting anyone.

Two new arrivals complicate everything. Jane Fairfax, accomplished, poor and unreadable, comes to stay with her aunt Miss Bates. Frank Churchill, the charming stepson of Emma’s former governess, arrives and pays Emma a great deal of attention. A piano is delivered anonymously to Jane. Frank makes odd remarks. Mr Knightley, who dislikes him, suspects something and says so, and Emma laughs at him.

At the Box Hill picnic the novel turns. Frank proposes a game in which everyone must say something clever, and Emma, showing off, tells Miss Bates that she will be limited to three dull things at once. Miss Bates is poor, has no prospects, talks too much, and depends entirely on the goodwill of people like Emma. She understands the joke and takes it well, which is worse. Afterwards Mr Knightley walks Emma to her carriage and tells her exactly what she has done, and it is the only time in the book anyone speaks to her without deference.

Then the revelations come quickly. Frank and Jane have been secretly engaged since before he arrived in Highbury; every attention paid to Emma was cover. Harriet, encouraged for a year to aim high, announces that she now loves Mr Knightley and has reason to think it returned. And Emma, in a single sentence, understands that Mr Knightley must marry nobody but herself.

The ending gives three marriages and returns Harriet to Robert Martin, who has been the right answer since chapter four.

How to read it

Read it twice. The second reading is a different book: every remark of Frank’s, every awkwardness of Jane’s, and the entire business of the piano become transparent, and you will not understand how you missed them.

Watch the narration for whose opinion you are being given. A useful exercise is to take any paragraph of judgement about Jane Fairfax and ask who is speaking. It is almost never Austen.

Do not skip the Eltons or Miss Bates. Mrs Elton is the novel’s demonstration of what Emma would be without money and taste, and Miss Bates’ monologues, which look like filler, are carefully seeded with information about Jane that the reader is supposed to skim past.

Pay attention to money. Austen gives exact figures. Emma has thirty thousand pounds and is under no pressure to marry at all, which is rare in this period and which shapes every choice she makes; Jane Fairfax has nothing and is facing work as a governess, which she compares to the slave trade.

The common misreading is that Emma is a light comedy about matchmaking. The plot turns on a woman with power over dependents using it carelessly, and the moral centre of the book is a joke at a picnic.

Questions it raises

• Emma is snobbish, interfering and unkind, and the novel is on her side. How does Austen manage that, and should she?
• Mr Knightley has known Emma since she was born and is sixteen years older. Is his correction of her love, or authority?
• Harriet is improved out of a good marriage and into a year of misery. Does the novel hold Emma responsible, or the class system that made the advice plausible?
• Frank Churchill deceives everyone for months and is forgiven in a page. Why does the book let him off?
• Jane Fairfax has the harder life and half the page space. Is she a rebuke to Emma or merely a contrast?
• Emma ends up married to the man next door and living with her father. Is that a happy ending on its own terms?