Emma

About this book

Emma is Jane Austen’s fourth published novel and the last to appear in her lifetime. It was published by John Murray in December 1815 and dedicated, at the request of his librarian, to the Prince Regent. The book is a comedy set in the village of Highbury, built around a young woman who believes she understands everyone around her and is wrong about nearly all of them.

It has lasted partly because it is funny and partly because of how it is told. Austen keeps the narration close to Emma’s point of view, so the reader shares her confident misjudgments and only gradually notices what she is missing. The novel is often described as the most carefully constructed of Austen’s books, and it has been adapted for film and television many times, in both period and modern dress.

The story

Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one, clever, well off, and the mistress of her father’s house since her sister married. Her governess and companion has just married too, a match Emma credits herself with arranging. Left with an anxious, hypochondriac father and little to do, she decides to take up matchmaking as a pastime and chooses as her project Harriet Smith, a pretty, pliable girl of unknown parentage from the local boarding school.

Emma steers Harriet away from a farmer who wants to marry her and toward the vicar, Mr. Elton, with results that embarrass everyone. Further complications arrive in the shape of Frank Churchill, the charming son of a neighbor, and Jane Fairfax, an accomplished and reserved young woman whom Emma dislikes without quite knowing why. Through it all her brother-in-law’s brother, Mr. Knightley, tells her plainly when she is behaving badly, and she mostly ignores him.

Themes and historical context

Austen wrote Emma between 1814 and 1815 at Chawton in Hampshire, where she had settled with her mother and sister. Like her other novels it is confined to a few families in a country neighborhood, but Highbury is drawn in more detail than any of her other settings, with its shop, its inn, its poor cottages, and its gradations of rank from the Woodhouses down to the tenant farmers.

Rank is the novel’s main subject. Emma cares about social position, as everyone in Highbury does; her error is applying the rules selectively, promoting Harriet above her station while snubbing people whose claims are better. The book is also about the limits of a clever person’s self-knowledge: Emma is right about a great deal and completely blind about herself.

The novel appeared at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a time when the English gentry’s assumptions about land, inheritance, and who could marry whom were being tested by new money and new kinds of mobility. Those pressures appear in the background, in the figure of the newly wealthy Mrs. Elton and in the uncertain futures of Jane Fairfax and Harriet.

Who should read it

Emma is Austen’s longest novel, at around 160,000 words, and its pace is deliberate. Nothing dramatic happens; the plot is made of visits, dinners, a ball, a picnic, and conversations. Readers who want the brisk romance of Pride and Prejudice may find the first volume slow, but the humor is steady throughout and the second half pays off everything the first half sets up. The language is early nineteenth-century English, formal but clear, with long sentences that reward reading at a steady pace rather than skimming.