In brief
A rich young woman with nothing to do decides to manage the love lives of a Surrey village, and gets every one of them wrong. That is nearly the whole plot of Emma, and its trick is that the reader gets them wrong too. Austen tells most of the book from inside Emma’s head, in Emma’s vocabulary, and runs a secret engagement through it in full view while Emma, and most first-time readers, look the other way.
Nobody elopes, and the great crisis is a joke at a picnic. “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on”, Austen told her niece Anna in 1814. Pride and Prejudice asks how a clever woman finds out she was wrong. Emma asks what happens when the clever woman also has money, rank and nobody to stop her.
The argument
The first sentence reads like praise: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence” (I.1). All the work is done by “seemed”. Within a page the narrator names “the real evils”: “the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself”. Austen’s other heroines have to marry well or live on less. Emma has “none of the usual inducements of women to marry” (I.10), and she is right. The subject is what unaccountable power does to a decent mind.
Emma is not cruel. Her fault is treating people as material: “She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners” (I.3).
Austen is said to have remarked, on starting, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” The line comes through her nephew’s Memoir of 1870, so it is family memory and not a document. As a forecast it was wrong; as a statement of the risk it was exact.
The shape of the book
The first edition had three volumes of 18, 18 and 19 chapters, and the Gutenberg text used here keeps that form, restarting the numbers in each volume. Other reprints number straight through from 1 to 55, so Box Hill, III.7 here, is chapter 43 there: add 18 for Volume II and 36 for Volume III.
Each volume turns on a misreading. In Volume I Mr Elton, whom Emma intends for Harriet, proposes to Emma herself in a carriage (I.15). Volume II repeats the game with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. Volume III delivers three blows: Box Hill, the engagement (III.10) and Harriet’s hope of Mr Knightley (III.11), which tells Emma what she feels. “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!”
The voice
Austen had used free indirect style before, but here it becomes the engine of the plot. The narration moves in and out of Emma’s mind with no signal, and a reader who takes the third person for an authority inherits her errors. “Why she did not like Jane Fairfax might be a difficult question to answer” (II.2): the narrator seems to be puzzling, but the evasion is Emma’s. John Mullan’s phrase is that the novel “bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind”.
A rare excursion from her viewpoint carries its own joke. In III.5 we watch with Mr Knightley, who “for some reason best known to himself” has taken a dislike to Frank. The reason is jealousy, as we learn eight chapters later.
Clues in plain sight
P. D. James gave a talk to the Jane Austen Society in 1998 called “Emma Considered as a Detective Story”. Frank and Jane have been engaged “ever since October—formed at Weymouth, and kept a secret from every body” (III.10), and the evidence is on the table throughout.
- The haircut. Frank goes sixteen miles to London “merely to have his hair cut” (II.7). In the next chapter a pianoforte reaches Jane unannounced from Broadwood’s (II.8). His letter later owns to the piano (III.14); the errand is left for us to connect.
- The post. Jane walks out in the rain for the letters. “It is my daily errand” (II.16).
- Mr Perry. “What became of Mr. Perry’s plan of setting up his carriage?” Frank asks (III.5). Mrs Weston has never heard of it. Almost nobody but the Bateses had, so he can only have had it from Jane.
- The word game. He pushes letters across the table. “The word was blunder”, and Jane blushes (III.5). Mr Knightley warns Emma, who dismisses him.
Much of this reaches us through Miss Bates, whose talk Emma does not listen to and we skim. The information is hidden in the voice everyone has decided is not worth attention.
Box Hill
The novel tilts on one remark at a bad-tempered picnic (III.7). Frank, with his fiancée sitting by, demands something clever or three things very dull from each guest. Miss Bates says she will manage three dull things as soon as she opens her mouth, and Emma “could not resist”. “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.”
It is a good joke, which is the trouble. Miss Bates’s reply is the hardest thing in Austen: “I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.” Emma had made the general case long before, gaily, to Harriet: “A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid!” (I.10). Box Hill is that remark said to the woman’s face.
Mr Knightley’s rebuke is an argument about rank, not manners: “Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance.” But “She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more.” And then: “It was badly done, indeed!” The next morning she calls on Miss Bates (III.8), the best thing she does in the book.
Harriet and class
Harriet Smith is “the natural daughter of somebody” (I.3). Emma decides on no evidence that “she is a gentleman’s daughter” (I.8) and talks her out of Robert Martin, a farmer who loves her: “The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do” (I.4).
Austen presses where that order hurts. Jane Fairfax, with every accomplishment and no money, faces the “governess-trade”, a sale “not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect”, and Mrs Elton assures her that Mr Suckling was “rather a friend to the abolition” (II.17). Harriet’s story ends with her father found, “the daughter of a tradesman” (III.19), and then a sentence in Emma’s voice, or the narrator’s, or both: “The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.” It is horrible, and the novel will not say who is speaking.
Does the ending reform her?
In part, and I think Austen knows which part. The recognition is real: “With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of every body’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange every body’s destiny” (III.11). She stops matchmaking and changes how she treats the Bateses.
But look at what survives. At the proposal the narrator remarks, “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure” (III.13), and Emma never tells Mr Knightley about Harriet’s hopes (III.17). She flirts with the man who deceived her: “I think there is a little likeness between us” (III.18). Harriet, her creation, is let go: “their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning” (III.19). That “fortunately” is the old Emma.
Nor does she give anything up. Mr Knightley leaves Donwell to live at Hartfield (III.15), so she keeps her house, her father and her place at the head of Highbury. Every blessing of the first sentence is intact, and “seemed” has been removed. She is reformed as a ruler is reformed, and the rule goes on. I read that as Austen’s honesty, not a failure of nerve: she will not hand us a new woman at twenty-one.
The people
Mr Knightley
Mr Knightley is “about seven or eight-and-thirty”, and “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them” (I.1). “I was sixteen years old when you were born” (I.12), he says, smiling, as a reason he is right. She has the better answer: “does not the lapse of one-and-twenty years bring our understandings a good deal nearer?” Then, engaged, he tells her he has “been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least” (III.17).
A modern reader stops at that sentence, and should. Austen writes the line as tender comedy, yet it describes a man who corrected a girl from childhood and then married her, and period context does not make that authority less real. What rescues the marriage for me, without excusing it, is that the novel keeps knocking him down. His judgement of Frank was jealousy. He says of his lectures, “I do not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself”, and she contradicts him. She will call him George only, she teases, “in the building in which N. takes M. for better, for worse”. To be known completely by someone who knew you at thirteen is both the comfort of this love story and its discomfort.
Miss Bates
Miss Bates is the great comic voice and the moral centre: a vicar’s daughter sliding down the scale, kept going by a “hind-quarter” of pork from Hartfield (II.3). The chatter that bores everyone is the only payment she has.
Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill
Jane Fairfax, whom Emma resents for being what she ought to have been, is the suppressed tragedy: ill, cornered and refusing the arrowroot Emma sends too late (III.9). John Henry Newman, who liked Emma, called her a dolt. I think she is the bravest person in the book, and the worst treated, by her charming fiancé above all.
How it was made
Austen wrote the book between 21 January 1814 and 29 March 1815, then left Egerton for John Murray, publisher of Byron and Scott. In autumn 1815 he offered £450 for Emma with the copyrights of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility. She refused and published 2,000 copies at her own risk, paying him ten per cent. They appeared in December 1815 with 1816 on the title page. Losses on a second edition of Mansfield Park were set against the profits, and her payment in 1817 was £38 18s.
The dedication came by accident. Nursing her brother Henry through a fever in autumn 1815, she learned from one of the Prince Regent’s physicians that the Prince kept her novels in every residence. His librarian, James Stanier Clarke, showed her round Carlton House on 13 November and said she was at liberty to dedicate her next book to him. Austen, who disapproved of the Regent, wrote asking whether this was obligatory. “It is certainly not incumbent on you”, Clarke replied, which no one in her position could take at face value. She made use of it, asking Murray whether the printers would hurry on knowing the work was “to be dedicated, by permission, to the Prince Regent”. The Gutenberg text used here omits the dedication page, as Bentley’s 1833 reissue did.
Clarke then proposed a romance on the House of Saxe Cobourg, unwritable, she said, “under any other motive than to save my life”. His hints became her satirical Plan of a Novel.
Readers and critics
On 25 December 1815 Murray asked Scott: “Have you any fancy to dash off an article on Emma? It wants incident and romance, does it not?” The piece ran unsigned in the Quarterly Review number dated October 1815, which came out in March 1816. Scott praised “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life”, compared her to “the Flemish school of painting”, and complained that fools like Mr Woodhouse and Miss Bates are “as tiresome in fiction as in real society”. He thought it had even less story than its predecessors, proof of how well the plot was hidden: he found Miss Bates too dull to hear. Austen’s complaint to Murray was the “total omission” of Mansfield Park.
Newman wrote of Emma, “I feel kind to her whenever I think of her.” Wayne Booth’s chapter in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) shows how inside views keep our sympathy while the narrator and Mr Knightley keep our judgement awake.
Afterlives
The great adaptation has no bonnets. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) sets the story in a Beverly Hills high school, with Alicia Silverstone as Cher, Paul Rudd as her former stepbrother Josh and an Elton still called Elton. It sees that Emma’s world runs on status, its Frank is unavailable because he is gay, and it softens the Knightley problem by making him a college student. Rajshree Ojha’s Aisha (2010), with Sonam Kapoor, moves the plot to upper-class Delhi.
The costume versions include Douglas McGrath’s 1996 film with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam, Andrew Davies’s ITV version of the same year with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong, Sandy Welch’s BBC serial of 2009 with Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller, and Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film, written by Eleanor Catton, with Anya Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn. All meet one difficulty: a camera cannot think in Emma’s words. Film can show her being wrong, but it struggles to make you wrong with her.
How to read it
Read next
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813). The lighter version of the same discovery.
- Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1897). A story held inside a limited mind, the method carried further.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989). The same effect in the first person: a voice we trust, and a truth it cannot see.