Emma, by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s fourth novel published in her lifetime, Emma, is both light, frothy comedy and a complex examination of personal development, change and self-revelation.

Jane Austen’s name is synonymous with English literature and the novel, yet her output was really quite meagre. This is not all her own fault, as she died young, at forty-two, mid-career as a writer. Had she lived to old age, how very different English literature would be, how many more Austen novels would be read today. By the time Jane Austen was writing Emma, the last novel she published during her life-time, she had hit her stride and seemed to write with greater ease and confidence. Emma was written between January 1814 and March 1815, then published in 1816. Earlier Austen novels were more heavily re-written and revised from her juvenilia.

Unlike its predecessor, Mansfield Park (1814), which had a much more sombre and serious tone, Emma reads on the surface like light, farcical comedy. On one level, it’s a comedy of errors. The novel contains many ridiculous misunderstandings and hasty judgements gone awry that border on farce. Overall Emma has a light and breezy feel, but as ever with Jane Austen, she is no ‘light’ writer, and the author’s deeply penetrating intellect and razor sharp ability to break down character into its minutest parts for examination, makes the novel something else again.

Maria Edgeworth, a contemporary of Austen’s, complained that Emma had no plot, and this is true. What Austen does by minimising the plot is to create a stream-of-consciousness style that is accessible, lively and enjoyable. Much of the ‘action’ happens either in conversation or in introspective episodes, that is, in people’s heads. The reader is presented with a group of intricately connected characters, their faults and virtues, deficiencies and competencies, and then carefully follows their mental processes, watching as truth is sifted from falsehood. Self-discovery is arrived at after an arduous process of personal trial and error.

This process of self-discovery is exemplified in the novel’s main character, Emma Woodhouse. Austen claimed she feared no one would like her heroine, but she need not have worried. Emma Woodhouse is an active busy-body to be sure, but her breezy confidence makes her very likeable. When she takes the hapless orphan Harriet Smith under her wing, and dissuades her from marrying the farmer Robert Martin in favour of the handsome Mr Elton, we know she really does want the best for Harriet, even if her considerable will to power is what prompts the intervention. Emma is also a very devoted daughter to her father, Mr Woodhouse, but again this is mixed with her bossy, domineering personality. In one passage of the novel, a large and imposing table is described as sitting in one of the rooms at the Woodhouse property, Hartfield, and it is specifically noted that Emma ordered the table, as Mr Woodhouse would never contemplate such a piece of furniture.

“The dream must be born with, and Mr Knightly must take his seat with the rest round the large modern circular table which Emma had introduced at Hartfield, and which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small-sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years, been crowded.”

It’s clearly obvious that Emma rules the roost, and exercises an unchallengeable power in her father’s house. Even her determination to never marry, and always look after her father, has a domineering aspect to it. No man will subdue her, while she will act almost as a constant nanny to her ridiculously hypochondriacal father. (He can barely leave the house without elaborate measures for transportation and warm clothing.)

Despite her bossiness and desire to control those around her (she swears off match-making early on in the novel, but simply finds it impossible to resist), Emma is the kind of person that gets things done and has fun to boot, which makes her also quite irresistible. She has ease and confidence, assuredness and good humour, making it easy to imagine her as a friend that’s always fun to be around.

The job Jane Austen sets herself in the novel is to show how Emma Woodhouse overcomes her own faults, sees past her vanities and poor judgements, to get a clearer view of the truth, both of herself and the various awkward situations she has helped to create. Guilt at her own bad behaviour and poor judgement leads to clarity of vision and self-realisation, culminating in her own happy marriage.

Emma achieves this realisation with the aid of regular intellectual jousting matches with Mr Knightly, her brother-in-law and a companion to her father, Mr Woodhouse. Emma and Mr Knightly are the two superior minds of the novel, and it is a joy to read them spar with each other, trying to prove whose judgement is the most accurate when it comes to the people they move amongst. Emma’s confidence is ultimately undermined when Mr Knightly, who in many ways is Emma’s conscience, upbraids her for her poor behaviour to a kindly yet ridiculous spinster, Miss Bates, at a social gathering. Emma is mortified when she realises the wrongness of her actions, and perhaps worse, Mr Knightly’s disapprobation.

There’s a key moment in Pride and Prejudice (1813), when Elizabeth Bennet realises the error of her ways, and says half way through the novel, ‘Until this moment I never knew myself.’ This pretty much sums up Emma’s realisation of her egregious behaviour to Miss Bates. All her previous errors come flooding back to her. When her protégé, Harriet Smith, declares her newly developed romantic interest in Mr Knightly, another reality that had been previously hidden from view dawns: she had been all along in love with Mr Knightly herself.

All Austen novel’s end with impossibly perfect marriages. Those who have never read a Jane Austen novel may be led to believe that they are all basically romance novels stuffed full of archaic, genteel manners. Yet all the existing marriages in her novels are pretty much on the shoddy side. The happy marriages are far and few between. Interestingly, in Sense and Sensibility (1811) Austen wrote that there was a ‘strange unsuitableness that often existed between married couples’. This is a strange and revealing line in itself. Was Jane Austen here observing that marriage was generally inappropriate for most people?

It’s tempting to see in Emma Woodhouse a version of the author herself as a very young woman, with all her juvenile faults and intellectual vanity, who then transforms herself by honestly confronting and analysing her behaviour. What makes Emma so readable today is Austen’s packaging of a stream-of-consciousness literature into a light, frothy comedy of errors. What seems light on the surface, is in fact on closer reading a complex examination of consciousness in the process of self-discovery, correction and change.

Emma, by Jane Austen. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141439587