Emma
by Jane Austen
Summary
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, has lived nearly twenty one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her, and Austen sets about arranging the distress personally. Mistress of her father's house in the village of Highbury and convinced she has a gift for matchmaking, Emma adopts the sweet, pliable Harriet Smith, talks her out of a farmer who loves her, and aims her at the vicar, who turns out to have designs on Emma herself. Around her, the village hums with material she misreads: the reserved Jane Fairfax and her mysterious piano, the charming visitor Frank Churchill, the endless talk of Miss Bates. Only Mr Knightley, her sister's brother in law and her oldest friend, ever tells her the truth about herself, most devastatingly after she humiliates Miss Bates on Box Hill, the novel's quiet catastrophe and one of the most painful scenes Austen wrote.
Austen said before starting it that she was going to take a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, and the wager is the book: Emma is vain, snobbish and wrong about nearly everything, and you end up loving her anyway, because the novel locks you inside her confidence so completely that every discovery lands on you both together. It is Austen's most technically dazzling performance, a mystery novel in which the clues are all in plain sight and the culprit is the narrator's own point of view.
It was published in December 1815 by John Murray, Byron's publisher, and dedicated, by royal hint she could not refuse, to the Prince Regent.
Historical Context & Significance
The dedication has a comic backstory: the Prince Regent's librarian gave Austen a tour of Carlton House and conveyed that a dedication would be acceptable, an honour from a man whose character she privately deplored. Murray offered 450 pounds for the copyright bundled with those of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility; Austen refused and published on commission instead, printing two thousand copies. The most consequential early review was Walter Scott's, unsigned in the Quarterly, saluting her command of the ordinary as something new in fiction.
Emma's reputation has risen steadily to the top of the pile, and many critics now call it her masterpiece on technical grounds, Robert McCrum among them. Its adaptability is its own evidence: Clueless moved Highbury to Beverly Hills in 1995 and lost almost nothing in transit, which says something about how exactly Austen mapped the social physics of a small world.