Emma by Jane Austen

“Emma” holds an unusual place in the work of Jane Austen, not least because it is a lot longer than her other novels. There's also the fact that she herself claimed that "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Apart from that, like much of 19th century English literature and almost all of Austen's other novels, this one deals with the attempt of upper class young women to find husbands, Except that Emma herself states early in this work that she will never get married. What the heck is going on here?

Well for openers, we can kind of understand what Austen meant by referring to her protagonist as unlikeable. Emma Woodhouse is friendly, generous, devoted to her father, and completely insufferable. As our story begins, Emma's governess Miss Taylor, the woman who practically raised her after the death of her mother when she was a child, has just married a man named Weston. (By the way, get ready – there are going to be a tremendous number of names in this book.) Emma credits herself with matching the two of them, although her participation in their engagement consisted primarily of inviting Mr. Weston over for dinner once and afterwards thinking to herself what a good match it would be. This wouldn't be so bad, though annoying to contemplate, except that having set herself up in her own mind as an expert matchmaker, Emma is now convinced that it's her duty to match up her unmarried neighbors, starting with an orphaned new acquaintance named Harriet Smith. Do I need to tell you that she's going to find out exactly how good a matchmaker she is? Do I need to warn you that many of her other projects will end about that well?

As you might guess from this description, “Emma” is rather episodic; much of it consists of a bunch of incidents only loosely joined together. This is another detail that makes this novel unusual in Jane Austen's corpus – she didn't usually move from plotline to plotline in quite that disconnected fashion. What saves the story of this woman for the reader is that, at all times, Emma means extremely well. She genuinely wants her friends and loved ones to be happy, including her father, Harriet Smith, and a neighbor named Mr. Knightley who has known her most of her life. The problem, of course, is that she thinks she knows what her loved ones need most in order to be happy, and intends to give it to them whether they like it or not.

For instance, she works as hard as she can to promote an engagement between Harriet Smith and a young man in the neighborhood named Elton, although by the standards of the day Mr. Elton is socially very much above Harriet (and her society does in fact use language like that, which we find terrifically jarring today). Emma thinks this match is coming along nicely until Mr. Elton passionately declares his love for Emma herself. When she rejects him as certainly as she can, he huffs off to London and shortly comes back with a wife that neither he nor anyone else ever met before. However, she is beautiful, rich, and even more insufferable than Emma herself, constantly exclaiming over how charming Emma's neighborhood is while at the same time casually mentioning how much superior her own native area is. You'd think Emma would learn a little something about herself by observing this new Mrs. Elton; it's going to take a little more than that.

In fact, there's only one person with the evident power of criticizing Emma, although this critique comes in a manner that she doesn't bother to take seriously until it's almost too late. That person is her dear old friend Mr. Knightley. Once she realizes that he's right about her, to say nothing of her realization that Harriet of all people is in love with him and by Emma's own advice believes she has a chance with him – well, I don't have to spell out for you how this all wraps up, do I? Jane Austen, as brilliant a novelist as she was, wrote romances, and you know how romances conclude even if you've never read one.

As with a lot of other genre literature, you don't read romances for the plot anyway. You read them for how they treat the plot. In Jane Austen's novels, too, you read them for how sharp she was about her society. And in “Emma”, you read it to see how the heroine – wealthy and well-disposed enough to make herself useful to the people of her region – becomes the sort of woman who can be happy with a husband and help him be happy too. That's the sort of happy story that can inspire us all to grow and change, and the production of which contributed to Jane Austen's description, by someone whose name I unfortunately can't remember, as a better writer than we deserve.

I've repeated that quote before, and I will again, because it sums up this author better than most such descriptions ever will.

Benshlomo says, A great book, like a great life, often includes some profound education.