Jane Austen's Books & Adaptations discussion

It might be interesting to compare different introductions to JA novels.

Sense and Sensibility (Barnes&Noble 2004)
Introduction by Laura Engel - part 1

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s first published novel, tells the story of the lives, loves, and longings of two sisters, the sensitive, romantic Marianne and the practical, even-tempered Elinor. With its extended cast of supporting characters, including the garrulous Mrs. Jennings, the stern Mr. Palmer, and the censorious Mrs. Ferrars, Sense and Sensibility revolves around two narratives: the possible romances of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and the day-to-day existence of everyone else. The constant anxiety that pervades the story stems from the possibility that the sisters may have to make do with the mundanity of country life, cluttered with gossip, clamor, and superficiality, instead of being swept away by the men of their dreams. In typical Austen fashion we are made aware from the outset that Marianne’s choice of suitor, the dashing and theatrical Willoughby, may be a disaster. Elinor’s more subdued love object, the shy and awkward Edward Ferrars, on the other hand, just might prove himself worthy if he could manage to articulate a full sentence.
Austen began working on Sense and Sensibility in 1795 with an epistolary fragment entitled “Elinor and Marianne” (now lost). The final version was not published until 1811, with a second edition issued in 1813 (Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, p. 8o; see “For Further Reading”). Once described as “bleak, dark, and nasty” compared with the “brightness” of Pride and Prejudice or the complexity of her more mature works Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility has recently undergone a critical renaissance. New editions, renewed scholarship, and a critically acclaimed film version have put the novel center stage.

Sense and Sensibility is a coming-of-age novel, and also a work that chronicles Austen’s own “coming of age”—her development as a writer. When she began working on “Elinor and Marianne” she was only twenty, a young woman with the possibility of courtship, marriage, and family open to her. By the time the second edition of the novel was released, Austen had moved from Hampshire to Bath, lost her adoring father, been disappointed in love, rejected a marriage proposal, and relocated again with her mother and sister to Chawton, where she turned her attention to writing. Austen’s sense of herself in the world must have been influenced by her close relationship with her only sister, Cassandra, who similarly was disappointed in love and in the awkward position of elder spinster aunt to a large and noisy upper-middle-class country family.
The only surviving portrait of Austen, a watercolor sketch by her sister, depicts the author as a plain, pensive subject with large eyes and a slight hint of a smile. She appears proper and subdued, unlike the description of her by a family friend, who pronounced her “certainly pretty—bright & a good deal of colour in her face—like a doll” (Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, p. 108). Austen’s niece Anna’s view of her aunt matches Cassandra’s portrayal of her: “Her complexion [is] of that rare sort which seems the particular property of light brunettes: a mottled skin, not fair, but perfectly clear and healthy; the fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark; the bright hazel eyes to match the rather small, but well shaped nose” (Austen-Leigh, p. 240) .

In keeping with Austen’s status as a respectable daughter of a clergyman, Sense and Sensibility was first published anonymously. The initial advertisement for the novel, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle on October 31, 1811, refers to the author as “A Lady.” A subsequent notice in the same paper on November 7, 1811, bills the work as “an extraordinary novel by A Lady.” A few weeks later the book was announced as “an Interesting Novel by Lady A” (Austen-Leigh, p. 254). Austen apparently made some money on the first edition. Her biographers Richard and William Austen-Leigh note that the £140 profit from the first edition of Sense and Sensibility was a considerable sum compared to the lesser proceeds her female contemporaries earned from their novels—the £30 Fanny Burney gained from sales of Evelina or the £100 Maria Edgeworth received for Castle Rackrent (Austen-Leigh, p. 255).

Austen was influenced by the writers of her youth. She adored Samuel Richardson, read Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, William Cowper, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe, and recited passages from Fanny Burney aloud (Gay, Jane Austen and the Theatre, p. 11). In Sense and Sensibility Austen echoes earlier novelists while at the same time anticipating the format of the nineteenth-century novel. Austen’s choice of translating “Elinor and Marianne” from an epistolary narrative (a novel in letters) into a story told by a central narrative allowed her to juxtapose the internal and external facets of her heroines. What we see Elinor do is often contrasted with what we know she is thinking. This gap between thought and action is highlighted repeatedly throughout the novel.

Marianne and Elinor have very different ideas about what they can and should reveal about their private thoughts. When Elinor pleads with Marianne to give her the details of her secretive relationship with the deceiving Willoughby, Marianne retorts: “Our situations then are alike. We have neither of us any thing to tell; you, because you communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing” (p. 138). What Marianne implies is that Elinor’s mode of communication, while utterly proper and correct, is always veiled and restrained. When pressed about her feelings for Edward, Elinor replies: “I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings. Believe them to be stronger than I have declared” (p. 18). In Austen’s world women cannot communicate effectively without revealing too much. They are left to perfect the art of innuendo, leading questions, and disguised sentiments. The slippery properties of language become a heroine’s greatest weapon. At the same time, a misunderstood phrase or rumor can cause her downfall.

The plot of Sense and Sensibility opens with the anxiety of displacement and disenfranchisement. The Dashwood sisters have just lost their father and have been forced out of their home by their conniving sister-in-law. Austen’s initial descriptions of Elinor and Marianne focus on their reactions to this financial crisis:
Elinor, this eldest daughter whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother.... She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong: but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught (p. 6).

Elinor’s ability to rule her emotions and provide rational, intelligent analyses of all situations puts her in sharp contrast to Marianne, who “was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent” (p. 6).
Echoing contemporary enlightenment debates on the relative merits of reason versus emotion, Austen’s sisters epitomize a shift in attitudes from the late eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Thomas Paine championed the rights of individuals rationally to govern themselves. Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), critiqued the ways women were educated in the late eighteenth century and brought up to believe that their only asset was their beauty and seductive charms. She writes: “But in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment” (Wollstonecraft, p. 105) . While Austen is not considered a radical novelist, in her depiction of the educated, pragmatic Elinor she moves away from the more feminine preoccupations of popular eighteenth-century heroines such as Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Elinor must concern herself with matters of the real world (money, lodgings, familial relationships and obligations) at the same time that she is secretly negotiating her feelings for Edward. Elinor’s calm and collected demeanor masks her internal dialogue, a contrast that would become the hallmark of Austen’s later heroines Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), Fanny Price (Mansfield Park), and Anne Elliot (Persuasion). In fact, Elinor’s desire to hide and master her true feelings is a necessity. If she weren’t there to organize her emotional mother and dreamy sister, nothing would get done. During the move from Norland, “Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she could exert herself. She could consult with her brother, could receive her sister-in-law on her arrival, and treat her with proper attention: and could strive to rouse her mother to similar exertion, and encourage her to similar forbearance” (p. 6).

The terms “sense” and “sensibility” have roots in eighteenth-century literary culture. Sentimental novels of the mid-eighteenth century such as Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa stressed the importance of a moral code through the trials and tribulations of the protagonists. Later in the century, novels and poetry of “sensibility,” featuring connections between nature and emotion, provided readers with new ways to view literature as both entertaining and instructive. Although Austen links Elinor with sense, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “natural understanding and intelligence,” Marianne’s acute sensibility, “the quality of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences,” is equally compelling and necessary. Marianne’s affinity for art and literature and her willingness to be swayed by her emotions are qualities that link her to eighteenth-century notions of sensibility that emphasized, according to the OED, “delicate sensitiveness of taste; also readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature and art.” Elinor’s propriety and self-restraint can be seen as a corrective to Marianne’s tempestuous theatrics. Yet it is Marianne who moves the story along and ultimately steals the show.

While Mansfield Park is the Austen novel most often connected to questions of the theater and theatricality, Sense and Sensibility is also a work that relies on theatrical conceits. Austen’s attention to theatrical details reflects her perception of her readers as audience members. She read all of her manuscripts aloud to her family, and it was through their encouragement that she managed to publish her work (Tomalin, p. 121). Austen also experimented with theatrical writings. Some of her earliest works were plays, and she may have performed in private stage productions. She regularly attended the theater and admired the leading actors and actresses of her day. In a letter written to her sister, Cassandra, on April 25, 1811, Austen discusses her anxiety about Sense and Sensibility’s public reception: “I am very much gratified by Mrs. K’s interest in it. I think she will like my Elinor, but cannot build on anything else.” She then goes on to evaluate the musical performances at a party she attended, explaining: “There was one female singer, a short Mrs. Davis all in blue ... & all the Performers gave great satisfaction by doing what they were paid for & giving themselves no airs.” The letter concludes with details of her trip to the Lyceum Theatre to see Isaac Bick erstaffe’s The Hypocrite and her disappointment at missing Sarah Siddons, the most famous actress of the era, playing Constance in Shakespeare’s King John: ...

Sense and Sensibility
Introduction by Laura Engel - part 2

“I had no chance of seeing Mrs. Siddons. I should particularly have liked to see her in Constance & could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me” (Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 184). Clearly, watching, critiquing, and analyzing various types of performances was a vital part of Austen’s life, particularly around the time of Sense and Sensibility’s publication. Although Austen has often been considered a reclu sive, quiet literary figure, her letters suggest that she was very much a part of the goings-on in her social world—a world that involved attending the theater, visiting art exhibitions, and shopping in fashionable London neighborhoods.

Austen may have enjoyed the theatre and been interested in specific actors and actresses, but her critique of display and artifice reflects a transition between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literary tastes. In her early writings, and later in Northanger Abbey, Austen parodies typically dramatic eighteenth-century characters, such as the libertine, the sentimental, and the Gothic heroine, along with conventional eighteenth-century plotlines: thwarted romance, abduction, intrigue, and exaggerated, implausible events. Aspects of these types of eighteenth-century narratives are in Sense and Sensibility, but they all occur offstage. Colonel Brandon’s stories about his former lover Eliza—her demise and Willoughby’s seduction of her daughter—are episodes that serve as cautionary tales dramatizing the consequences that befall women who behave improperly. On the main stage of the novel this sort of acting out is contained, but the subtleties of disguise and satire, emphasized by descriptions of behavior, gesture, costume, and staging, are central to the progression of the narrative. The plot structure relies on theatrical conceits—pairs of characters, parallel story lines, staged scenes, groups of characters thrown together in awkward situations, misidentifications, and dramatic monologues.

Some of the best moments in the novel are scenes of dramatic confusion. The awkward exchange during which Mrs. Jennings expresses her belief that Elinor is engaged to Colonel Brandon; Colonel Brandon’s entrances when Marianne expects Willoughby ; and Edward’s ill-timed visit to Elinor when she is already entertaining Lucy, are moments of misrecognition that lead up to the final moment when Edward arrives at Barton Cottage to inform Elinor that he is, in fact, not married. Austen deliberately plays with the pleasures of dramatic irony and suspense, thus highlighting the importance of uncertainty—a state that Elinor finds unbearable. She would rather not entertain the notion of probabilities until they are specifically stated and explained. This preference has as much to do with her notions of proper behavior as with her attempt to protect herself from disappointment.

Austen’s exploration of the pitfalls and possibilities of theatrical expression is illustrated in her portrayal of Marianne. Marianne is a natural actress in the sense that she is demonstrative and expressive—sighing, swooning, laughing, vehemently declaring opinions. She is unable to hide her passionate feelings. She is always the primary performer in her own story. She takes center stage and commands the audience’s attention. She has no patience for characters who cannot act well or do not appear in the right costumes. She is embarrassed by Edward’s attempts to read poetry, and her initial reaction to Colonel Brandon is disgust at his propensity for wearing flannel waistcoats.

Despite her flair for the dramatic, Marianne is actually a terrible actress, because she is incapable of deception and duplicity. She is so easy to read and decipher because her emotions and moods have physiological manifestations. After Marianne sees Willoughby with his new mistress, she is inconsolable: “The restless state of Marianne’s mind not only prevented her from remaining in the room a moment after she was dressed, but requiring at once solitude and continual change of place, made her wander about the house till breakfast-time, avoiding the sight of every body” (p. 147). Marianne’s feelings lead her to improper actions, such as going on a private tour of Willoughby’s home, Allenham, and writing him letters without an agreement between them. Her lack of restraint leads to devastating disappointment and a near-fatal illness.

Marianne’s theatrical tendencies and her subsequent nervous collapse have interesting historical corollaries. Acting techniques of the late eighteenth century, introduced by the actor and theater manager David Garrick and perfected by actresses such as Sarah Siddons, emphasized connections between emotions and specific expressions and gestures. Marianne’s “dreadful whiteness,” “inability to stand,” “frequent bursts of grief,” and “desperate calmness” may have been visually inspired by Austen’s trips to the theater to see actresses in popular tragic roles. A preoccupation with madness, love, and death was prevalent in many eighteenth-century novels. The plight of these heroines reflects the eighteenth-century belief that women were particularly susceptible to maladies caused by unchecked passions and violent attachments. A popular eighteenth-century diagnosis of madness focused on the state of an individual’s nerves, a condition that was diagnosed by observing the subject’s behavior. This condition of anxiety and agitation became known as “the English malady.” Marianne’s reaction to disappointment in love would have been familiar to eighteenth-century readers, but her recovery and decision to transform herself into a dutiful wife seems to be Austen’s revision of an older plot device.

Elinor is not a theatrical character. She is controlled and cool, but not naturally so; therefore she must be an excellent actress in order to contain and disguise her emotions and the exuberance of her imagination. She must tell herself to calm down, berating herself for having any expectations until she is absolutely sure that Edward loves her. In contrast to Marianne, who cannot subdue her feelings—“But to appear happy when I am so miserable—oh, who can require it?” (p. 155), Elinor must wait to be left alone so she can be “at liberty to think and be wretched” (p. 111). In this way Elinor’s world is more self-reflective and divided than Marianne’s; she must have an outward self and a private self to survive. As the audience, we can watch her on both stages and see what is at stake in each.

In its attention to dialogue, modes of expression, and the dilemma of how to communicate effectively, Sense and Sensibility examines the value of everyday language. In the world of the novel the characters who speak the most are portrayed as gossipy, boring, and sometimes devious. In fact, the novel is full of women talking, sometimes cruelly, sometimes affectionately, but mostly to fill the silent gaps in conversation left by the much less verbal men. With characteristic wit Austen writes:
John Dashwood had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less. But there was no peculiar disgrace in this; for it was very much the case with the chief of their visitors, who almost all laboured under one or other of these disqualifications for being agreeable—want of sense, either natural or improved—want of elegance—want of spirits—or want of temper (pp.191-92).

Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Middleton speak endlessly about their children or the goings-on in the neighborhood. The relationship between doting mothers and their children are par odied in scenes where Elinor and Marianne are forced to endure afternoons with unruly offspring. Elinor observes Lady Middleton’s inability to discipline her darlings:
She saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent encroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment. It suggested no other surprise than that Elinor and Marianne should sit so composedly by, without claiming a share in what was passing (p. 99).

Interestingly, the children’s antics here deliberately dismantle the trappings of late eighteenth-century femininity. The Miss Steeles endure being undressed, “their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears,” searched, and deprived of their domestic weapons—knives and scissors—used in female employments such as embroidery and sewing. Elinor and Marianne’s lack of participation provides them with an ironic distance in this domestic drama; neither seems interested in playing traditional female roles. It follows, then, that women in the novel have trouble understanding the Dashwood sisters. As for Lady Middleton, “because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given” (p. 201). Not only is Lady Middleton incapable of sympathizing with Elinor and Marianne, but she has no real idea of the meaning of her characterization of them. Lady Middleton’s role as a typical upper-class woman of her time seems a pointed critique of the ways women misuse and misunderstand language.

Often tidbits of female news have a direct impact on Elinor or Marianne. After the debacle with Willoughby, Mrs. Palmer notes all the material particulars of his new match: “She could soon tell at what coachmaker’s the new carriage was building, by what painter Mr. Willoughby’s portrait was drawn, and at what warehouse Miss Grey’s clothes might be seen” (p. 176). Through Mrs. Palmer’s preoccupation with the material goods that signify engagements—carriages, portraits, clothes—Austen suggests Willoughby’s union with Miss Grey is not based on any real emotion or connection, but on social conventions and pressures. In addition, the gossipy voice of Mrs. Palmer provides Austen with a way of satirizing society’s desire for novelties and anecdotes at the expense of more significant or intangible concerns.

In Sense and Sensibility it is the characters with the least sense who get the most airtime and those with the most important news who are ignored. Colonel Brandon, perhaps the most substantial male character in the novel, is described by his rival Willoughby as someone “whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to” (p. 42). Marianne comments on the fact that women are not supposed to talk about anything of interest: “I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank. I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful:—had I talked only of the weather and the roads, and had I spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have been spared” (p. 40) .

Sense and Sensibility
Introduction by Laura Engel - part 3

Characters that have a grasp of the devastating possibilities of language are particularly dangerous. The second chapter of the novel is an extended dialogue between John Dashwood and his wife on the relative merits of bequeathing an allowance to his sisters. By manipulating his sentiments and cleverly managing her own agenda, Mrs. Dashwood succeeds in ensuring that the Dashwood sisters are left with next to nothing. At one point she declares, “Altogether, they will have five hundred a year amongst them, and what on earth can four women want for more than that? They will live so cheap! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses, and hardly any servants ; they will keep no company, and can have no expenses of any kind! Only conceive how comfortable they will be!” (p. 10). Mrs. Dashwood is just one of the many female characters in the novel who use the subtle art of dialogue to further their own causes.

Lucy Steele, Elinor’s rival for Edward’s affections, is perhaps the most conniving female character. Ironically, Elinor and Lucy are both highly skilled actresses. But while Lucy’s deceptions are based on her own narcissism and sense of competition, Elinor’s are based on a sense of pride and self-restraint. In Lucy’s confession to Elinor of her secret engagement to Edward, every word seems calculated to unmask Elinor, who is able only with great effort to subdue her powerful emotions. Lucy remarks, “Though you do not know him so well as me, Miss Dashwood, you must have seen enough of him to be sensible he is very capable of making a woman sincerely attached to him” (pp. 107-8) . Lucy’s idea that Elinor must have seen enough of Edward to ascertain his value reveals her own inability to read people and situations.

Visual cues in the novel are usually deceptive. Lucy’s proofs of her connection to Edward are objects: a miniature of Edward, a letter, and the ring that Elinor has seen on Edward’s finger. All these clues lead Elinor to surmise that Lucy is telling the truth. These props, however, are not evidence of Edward’s affections, but rather, signs of old-fashioned forms of romance rituals. Just as with Mrs. Palmer’s observations about the accessories of Willoughby’s marriage, Lucy’s visual evidence of her attachment to Edward suggests that for Austen there is something more important than the theatrical staging of romantic relationships; what appears on the surface has to be read, analyzed, and cleverly interpreted.

What we see of Elinor is also complex. In the scene where the characters are admiring Elinor’s decorated screens, it seems particularly important that we never see what the screens look like. The decorations are not described, and there is no opportunity for the reader to use visual metaphors to analyze Elinor. What is more significant is how Elinor’s screens are passed around the drawing room for inspection. Austen writes: “Before her removing from Norland, Elinor had painted a very pretty pair of screens for her sister-in-law, which being now just mounted and brought home, ornamented her present drawing-room; and these screens, catching the eye of John Dashwood on his following the other gentlemen into the room, were officiously handed by him to Colonel Brandon for his admiration” (p. 192). John Dashwood offers his analysis of Elinor’s artistic talents: “ ‘These are done by my eldest sister,’ said he; ‘and you, as a man of taste, will, I dare say, be pleased with them. I do not know whether you ever happened to see any of her performances before, but she is in general reckoned to draw extremely well’ ” (p. 193). John Dashwood, of course, has no opinion of his own to offer on Elinor’s work, only what others have in general “reckoned about her,” but the rude Mrs. Ferrars pronounces them “ ’very pretty‘—and, without regarding them at all, returned them to her daughter” (p. 208). This provokes a discussion of Miss Morton (Edward’s intended fiancée), who paints “most delightfully” (p. 193), a comparison that inspires Marianne’s wrath on the part of her injured sister. She exclaims: “This is admiration of a very particular kind! what is Miss Morton to us? who knows, or who cares, for her?—it is Elinor of whom we think and speak” (p. 193).

Using a theatrical setup, Austen stages a scene of subtle insults in which Marianne is the only character who reveals her true feelings. Screens—objects used to shield oneself from the heat and sparks of a fire—can be seen as theatrical props used for protection and disguise. The screens function as a metaphor for the layers of concealment operating in the scene. Elinor cannot reveal to Mrs. Ferrars that she is in love with Edward. She is also watching Lucy interact with Mrs. Ferrars, who is under the mistaken impression that Edward will soon be engaged to Miss Morton. John Dashwood feels guilty about not providing for his sisters and must make up for it by attempting to praise them in front of visitors. Colonel Brandon, in the midst of all this, is observing Marianne, the woman he secretly loves, who is miserable about having been jilted by Willoughby. Elinor’s opaque screens suggest that her art is in her acts of concealment. She is the best at remaining calm in this scene. In the larger scheme of the novel she remains closed to us, except for what Austen allows us to see with entry into her private thoughts. In addition, the screens highlight the fact that visual cues in Sense and Sensibility are usually misread; very few characters see anything correctly and even fewer have the intelligence or thoughtfulness required to read or interpret information.

The episodes of Sense and Sensibility are divided between the more theatrical world of London and the private, quieter space of the country. London mirrors the pressures of the external world. The potentially damaging consequences of exposure, publicity, and revelation are illustrated in the episodes that occur away from the Dashwood’s country home. Marianne’s obsession with getting in touch with Willoughby provides the narrative tension for the middle section of the novel. Her encounter with Willoughby at the ball is a terrifying scene in which what she imagines to be true—her engagement to Willoughby—is irrevocably denied by the reality of his performance: He ignores her and appears attached to another woman. Although Austen provides readers with some clues about Willoughby’s character—his reading of Hamlet, for example—we are still struck by his cruelty and Marianne’s inability to accept that she has misunderstood Willoughby’s intentions. Elinor sees that “to wait, at least, with the appearance of composure, till she might speak to him with more privacy and more effect, was impossible, for Marianne continued incessantly to give way in a low voice to the misery of her feelings, by exclamations of wretchedness” (p. 145). The anxiety inherent in misreadings becomes, for Austen, a way of emphasizing a need for new methods of interpretation that take into account both external and internal information.

Marianne’s desire for news of and contact with Willoughby, and everyone else’s desire to understand the nature of their relationship, reflect a larger societal hunger for gossip and intrigue. What is overheard and discovered in coffeehouses and shopping districts becomes a valuable commodity. Austen questions the nature of value in a scene where Elinor observes a man (who she later learns is Robert Ferrars, Edward’s brother) purchasing a toothpick-case. She writes:
He was giving orders for a toothpick-case for himself; and till its size, shape, and ornaments were determined, all of which, after examining and debating for a quarter of an hour over every toothpick-case in the shop, were finally arranged by his own inventive fancy, he had no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies than what was comprised in three or four very broad stares; a kind of notice which served to imprint on Elinor the remembrance of a person and face of strong, natural, sterling insignificance, though adorned in the first style of fashion (p.181).

Robert Ferrars’s attention to the minute details of a toothpick-case is contrasted with what he fails to notice: the presence of the two ladies. His “sterling insignificance” is analogous to his need for such a superfluous decorative item. Elinor then meets her brother, and the topic of conversation for the rest of the chapter is all about various types of value: a discussion of Colonel Brandon’s financial situation is followed by an assessment of Edward’s proposed fiancée’s worth; an evaluation of the property value of Norland connects to a list of the items the Dashwoods needed to purchase when moving into their new home; and ultimately, the conversation ends with praise for Mrs. Jennings, whom Mr. Dashwood considers to be “ ‘a most valuable woman indeed,’ ”judging by her house and her style of living (p. 185). Linking toothpick-cases to houses, linen, china, and people, Austen cleverly questions the notion of what is intrinsically valuable and what passes for “inventive fancy.” In highlighting the com modification of language, feeling, and relationships, Austen points to the larger impact on individuals of a rapidly emerging commercial economy. The real world of London, outside the safety and comfort of the country, is seen as both potentially devastating and ridiculous.

On the other hand, London presents Elinor with a series of distractions. She is able to put her own feeling aside for the moment while Edward and Lucy are temporarily offstage and Marianne is fretting about Willoughby. It also seems clear that the country as it once was, epitomized by Marianne’s affection for poems about cottages and trees, as well as her soliloquy when leaving her ancestral home—“Dear, dear Norland! ... when shall I cease to regret you!” (p. 23)—is rapidly disappearing. Marianne’s constant references to eighteenth-century aesthetic tastes, picturesque landscapes, ruined cottages, and collapsed trees suggest that she views the country through a clouded nostalgic visual lens. The pressures of renovation and renewal threaten to transform the landscape. When Mrs. Dashwood speaks of changing Barton Cottage, the sentimental Willoughby remarks, “And yet this house you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it of its simplicity by imaginary improvement!” (p. 61).

Willoughby’s desire to keep things as they were is an interesting corollary to his position as an eighteenth-century figure (the libertine) in a nineteenth-century novel. Austen renovates his character by including a scene at the end of the novel in which he attempts to apologize for his behavior toward Marianne. Unlike the classic libertine, who exhibits no remorse for his horrible actions, Willoughby, when faced with the possibility of Marianne’s death, admits that he loved her all along and will suffer forever for his unfortunate choices. Even Elinor is moved by his confession, in part because it allows her to hope that Edward might always regret his choices as well. Although Willoughby cannot recover from his mistakes, Edward and Colonel Brandon, who both also have shady pasts, are able to reinvent themselves and emerge as new, improved suitors for Elinor and Marianne. While Austen critiques her characters’ passion for novelty, she also seems wary of relying too much on the customs and traditions of an antiquated world. Her attention to modes of renewal in the novel, of spaces, characters, and relationships, reflects her interest in renovating the novel form. Marianne’s final acceptance of “second attachments” points to a revised vision of what might work for nineteenth-century heroines.

Sense and Sensibility
Introduction by Laura Engel - part 4

Throughout Sense and Sensibility Marianne’s public and private selves are indistinguishable. Her inability to disguise her feelings is linked to her idea that everyone must see the world in the same way she does. “Like half the rest of the world, if more than half there be that are clever and good, Marianne, with excellent abilities and an excellent disposition, was neither reasonable nor candid. She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself” (p. 164). Austen suggests that the most dangerous thing for women is to reveal themselves and to assume that they will be understood and valued. All they have of their own is an ability to safeguard a realm of privacy, a place of no access—metaphorically demonstrated by Elinor’s screens. But this lesson, like everything else in Austen’s world, threatens to break down; Elinor can’t keep up her façade of tranquillity in parts of the novel, and her constant self-policing leads to resentment, anger, and depression.
By the end of the novel Marianne learns to subdue her sensibility for her own good, and she settles in to the more boring, conventional role of dutiful wife. Austen writes:

Instead of falling a sacrifice to an irresistible passion, as once she had fondly flattered herself with expecting, instead of remaining even for ever with her mother, and finding her only pleasures in retirement and study, as afterwards in her more calm and sober judgment had determined on,—she found herself at nineteen submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village (p. 311).

Marianne’s loss of passion, and her submission to her new role as mistress of the neighborhood, provides evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s critique of the nonemotional nature of Austen’s work. In a letter to a friend, Brontë wrote of Austen:
Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores (Barker, The Brontës, p. 635).

Reading Sense and Sensibility, one is tempted to point out that the story is, in fact, all about “the human heart” and what conspires against it. Austen explores the layers subtly covering Brontë’s notion of what “throbs fast and full”: the inarticulate, intangible disquiet that haunts drawing rooms and country houses; the terrifying reality of not being loved and ending up alone, the frustration of being misread and misunderstood. In her attention to both the exterior theatrics of display along with the interior workings of the psyche, Austen invites her readers to consider new methods of interpretation. Even in its unsatisfying conclusion, Sense and Sensibility leaves one thing intact: The bond between Elinor and Marianne is ultimately more restorative than any romance or happy ending.



Laura Engel received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and drama. Her previous publications include essays on the novelists A. S. Byatt and Edna O‘Brien. She is currently working on a book that explores the connections between women and celebrity in eighteenth-century culture.

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 1

It has become conventional to print a warning at the head of an introduction such as this one, which will be giving away details of the novel’s plot. Any first-time reader wanting not to lose the pleasure of surprises should stop reading the introduction now, and read the novel first. Jane Austen’s Emma peculiarly merits such a warning. The reason that an uninitiated reader should certainly abandon this introduction bears upon Emma’s narrative technique. This is a novel about making mistakes which lures the reader into making mistakes too. To the unsuspecting, the subject matter may seem unadventurous: the ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ that Austen recommended to her niece Anna, a would-be novelist herself, as ‘the very thing to work on’.1 In fact, while having just this parochial focus, Emma is a formally audacious and experimental novel, playing unprecedented tricks with a reader’s assumptions about its characters’ motivations. It is narrated in the third person, but mostly from the point of view of a protagonist who is mostly wrong about things. The narrative everywhere takes on the colouring of her misconceptions. Emma Woodhouse is certainly ‘clever’, as we are told in the novel’s first sentence, but she is also energetically self-deluding. The reader is primed to recognize some of her delusions, but is also led into sharing some of her misapprehensions. One strange pleasure offered to the first-time reader is that of discovering that he or she has not read correctly, that he or she has missed some of the clues as to what is really going on.

Reading clues is what Emma likes to do. At one stage in the novel, she is called an ‘imaginist’ (p. 256). The rarity of the word (which Austen may well have thought that she was coining) draws attention to the ingenuity that the novel’s heroine devotes to divining the thoughts of those around her. For the most part, this ingenuity is put to the service of matchmaking. As a kind of substitute for any love interest of her own, Emma plots the courtships and eventual betrothals (as she supposes) of others. While she does this, Austen expects her reader to be a kind of ‘imaginist’ too, working out where the amorous inclinations of characters really tend. Much of the first volume of the novel is concerned with Emma’s scheme to make a match between her chosen protegée, the pretty, sweet-natured but dim-witted Harriet Smith, and the most eligible bachelor in the parish: the smooth, ambitious young vicar, Mr Elton. The first-time reader will surely congratulate him- or herself on being able to see what our heroine cannot: that Mr Elton is interested not in Harriet but in Emma. We have been alerted in the third chapter to the fact that he enjoys his visits to Mr Woodhouse for ‘the smiles of his lovely daughter’ (who is also very rich) (p. 17). It is clear that he is superficially pleasant to Harriet only because she is Emma’s companion. Emma, however, has ‘fixed on’ Mr Elton as Harriet’s husband-to-be and readily sees evidence that he is complying with her schemes.

We only have to listen to Mr Elton speaking to know that she must be wrong. His very first words in the novel are compliments to Emma that she takes to be for Harriet.

‘You have given Miss Smith all that she required,’ said he; ‘you have made her graceful and easy. She was a beautiful creature when she came to you, but, in my opinion, the attractions you have added are infinitely superior to what she received from nature.’ (p. 33)

How could Emma think this absurd tribute shows that he is ‘falling in love’ with Harriet? What he says — that he is pleased by how ductile Miss Smith has been in Emma’s hands — should, instead, unsettle her. The reader has already witnessed with discomfort Emma’s pleasure in moulding Harriet. ‘Skilful has been the hand,’ Mr Elton adds, and Austen lets us imagine his ingratiating tone. As the chapter proceeds, he first encourages Emma to undertake a drawing of Harriet, and then unctuously over-praises her efforts. Austen lets us hear exactly what he is up to. The clues are there in his very pauses: when Emma encourages him to write a rhyming charade for herself and Harriet, he affects reluctance. ‘He was afraid not even Miss Woodhouse’ — he stopt a moment — ‘or Miss Smith could inspire him’ (p. 56). It is painfully amusing to listen to this, knowing how Emma interprets it so differently — so wrongly. Austen allows dialogue to run its course, without steer or interruption.

Emma is so assured of her own cleverness that she will ignore even explicit warnings. It is as if Austen wants to give her protagonist every chance to avoid the mistakes that she will determinedly go on to make. First, Mr Knightley, who understands Emma like no one else, shrewdly guesses that she is trying to make a match between Harriet and Mr Elton and counsels her that her contrivances will be ‘all labour in vain’ (p. 52). He has been with Mr Elton when only men were present and heard something very different from the gallantry he maintains in the company of women. In all her novels, Austen is skilled at letting us imagine the conversations that have taken place just off stage; this indirect glimpse of worldly masculine chat is chilling. ‘He knows the value of a good income as well as any body. Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally’ (p. 52). On the day of the Westons’ dinner party, Mr Knightley’s observant brother, Mr John Knightley, tries to alert Emma to the possibility that she, not Harriet, is the object of Mr Elton’s amorous ambitions. ‘I think your manners to him encouraging. I speak as a friend, Emma. You had better look about you, and ascertain what you do, and what you mean to do’ (p. 88). She assures him that he is mistaken and ponders with amusement the mistakes often made by ‘people of high pretensions to judgment’. Yet, as the dinner party ends and the evening tea is served, even Emma notices Mr Elton’s ‘extreme solicitude’ for her. ‘It did appear . . . exactly like the pretence of being in love with her, instead of Harriet’ (p. 97). She sees this, but she misunderstands it as ‘inconstancy’.

So, we are well prepared for the proposal that will take Emma aback. The scene in which Mr Elton, inspirited by the excellent wine at Mr Weston’s dinner table, makes ‘violent love’ to Emma in

her carriage, returning home on a snowy Christmas Eve, is delicious precisely because the reader does not share Emma’s surprise. Mr Elton’s proposal is comic, in part, because he has no idea that he might be turned down. Many readers will already know, from Pride and Prejudice, the fate of a man who proposes marriage as though he cannot imagine that the answer might be ‘no’. However different they may otherwise be, Mr Darcy, white with anger when his declaration of love is rebuffed by Elizabeth, belongs in the same category as Mr Collins, who also puts himself forward as a prospective husband without any anxiety as to the young lady’s response. In some ways, Mr Darcy’s proposal is even more ineptly presumptuous. His painful lesson in hubris is well-earned. He should have known that a heartfelt proposal is doubtful of its reception. When Mr Knightley eventually proposes to Emma, it is with an awkward fearfulness that signals deep feeling. ‘Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?’ (p. 330) To know that you might not succeed is the condition of success.

Mr Elton’s proposal is also comic because, while he certainly does not love Harriet, he clearly does not love Emma either. As we will see, though Emma is frequently wrong, Austen allows the reader to discern when she is absolutely right. Thinking back over the whole embarrassing episode, later the same night, she is sure that he but ‘pretended to be in love’ with her (p. 105). ‘There had been no real affection either in his language or manners.’ Everything is wrong about his declaration, not least (à la Mr. Collins) his complete inability to be halted by the protests of the woman to whom he is declaring his devotion. Mr Elton is no fool, yet he entirely fails to register that his dismissive remarks about Harriet will merely trigger Emma’s resentment. He cannot imagine that Emma does not really share his disdain for Harriet. Emma’s interjections draw from him one of the nastiest remarks in all her fiction.

‘I wish her extremely well: and, no doubt, there are men who might not object to — Every body has their level: but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss.’ (p. 103)

There is self-regard and snobbery here, but also contempt. When Emma mentions his ‘attentions’ to Miss Smith, he assures her that he ‘never cared whether she were dead or alive, but as your friend’. He uses a common idiom, but he evidently means just what he says.

Emma is undeceived, but Austen’s technical brilliance is truly shown in the passage that follows this comically calamitous episode. A new chapter opens with Emma alone, contemplating her misjudgement in having persuaded the all-too-persuadable Harriet that Mr Elton was in love with her. You might almost suppose that she is mortified and duly corrected.

The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. — It was a wretched business, indeed! — Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for! — Such a development of every thing most unwelcome! — Such a blow for Harriet! — that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken — more in error — more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself. (p. 104)

Those dashes and exclamation marks comprise a system of punctuation that Austen perfected in Emma for the dramatization of her protagonist’s thoughts. By allowing those thoughts to pulse through the narrative, Austen lets us sense how self-deluding Emma remains. She begins by regretting the failure of her own schemes, before she sets about convincing herself that Harriet’s impending disappointment is her real concern and assuring herself that she would ‘gladly’ have suffered anything rather than have caused this. Her apparent mortification becomes proof to herself of her disinterestedness.

As the chapter goes on, she reviews Mr Elton’s behaviour. Austen’s sentences catch us up in Emma’s perplexity at having been ‘so deceived’ and her self-consoling arrival at the decision that Mr Elton himself was to blame. ‘His manners . . . must have been unmarked, wavering, dubious, or she could not have been so misled.’ That ‘must’ is Emma’s ‘must’; those three nearly synonymous adjectives are making her case for her. As her survey of her ‘blunders’ stretches over a dozen paragraphs, her self-condemnation keeps veering into self-exculpation, supported by her indignation that Mr Elton had seemed unaware of her own superiority to him ‘in fortune and consequence’ (p. 106). Even as she chastises herself for ‘adventuring too far’ in trying to bring Harriet and Mr Elton together, she congratulates herself for persuading Harriet to reject the proposal of marriage from Mr Robert Martin: ‘There I was quite right’ (p. 107). Is this an end to her matchmaking exploits? ‘She was quite concerned and ashamed, and resolved to do such things no more.’ The resolution is designed to convince herself, but not the reader.

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 2

It was highly unusual for a novel in the early nineteenth century to have a heroine distinguished by her misguidedness (indeed, it is still unusual). Even more so, when this leads her to interfere, potentially disastrously, in the lives of others. The initiating action in the novel is Emma’s persuading Harriet to reject Robert Martin’s proposal, when it is clear that Harriet feels real fondness for him and that, left to her own devices, she would have accepted it. It is quite a risk to have her protagonist meddle to destroy the happiness of another person. Austen’s mischievous announcement that ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’ shows her awareness that she was trying something deeply unconventional.2 The heroines of eighteenth-century novels might be deceived (like, for instance, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa) or naïve (like Fanny Burney’s Evelina), but in such cases the young woman’s limited knowledge is further proof of her virtue. The only evident precursor of Emma was a favourite novel of Austen’s, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. In this novel, the heroine, Arabella, devours her dead mother’s store of French romances and, living in some seclusion, supposes that they offer ‘real Pictures of Life’.3 She fancies herself besieged by adoring, pining suitors whom she is obliged to treat with disdain. (Lennox’s novel is likely to have been an influence on Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which features a heroine who is comically misled by her enthusiasm for Gothic novels.) Yet the reader of The Female Quixote looks down on the exploits of this heroine, amazed at the pertinacity of her fiction-fed delusions, sometimes exasperated by them, but never in doubt about what is true or real. This novel is no model for Emma.

Austen’s novel was innovative because it bent the narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though its inventiveness was little noticed by most pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf. Woolf herself wrote that if Austen had lived longer and written more, ‘She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust’.4 In Emma, she is. Austen wrote the novel at the height of her powers. She had completed her third novel, Mansfield Park, in summer (probably July) 1813 and began writing Emma in late January 1814.5 She had not even received the proofs of Mansfield Park before she was at work on her next book. Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, was self-effacing, powerless, and often silent or absent. As if in response to her own earlier invention, Austen now created a heroine who is assertive, over-confident, and all too powerful. Emma Woodhouse pushes herself forward in the novel’s title and its very first sentence. She is the only one of Austen’s heroines to be financially secure from the very beginning. She can do as she wishes. Emma has the highest proportion of dialogue of all Austen’s novels, and its heroine speaks more than any other character in all her fiction.6 For the reader as well as for the inhabitants of Highbury, she is imperious. Yet her empire is a tiny one. The world of Emma is geographically more tightly circumscribed than that of any other Austen novel. Each of her other five novels features at least one major change of scene. Emma seems rarely to have been beyond Highbury. She has never seen the sea and has not even visited the nearby beauty spot of Box Hill, before Mrs Elton organizes an outing there. Austen wanted her heroine’s power to be based on her limited vision of the world.

It took Austen a little over a year to complete the novel. She had the confidence to try a new publisher, John Murray, socially a good deal smarter than her previous publisher, Thomas Egerton. In October 1815 she travelled to London with her brother Henry, her usual literary adviser, to negotiate with Murray directly. He offered her £450, but for this sum wanted also to have the copyrights to Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility. Austen, rightly, thought the offer not good enough, so Murray agreed to publish Emma ‘on commission’. This meant that Austen would pay the costs of producing the book, but would then receive all the profits, less Murray’s 10 per cent commission. (She had adopted the same means of publication with Sense and Sensibility, and had profited handsomely from the arrangement.) While she was in London for the negotiation, she stayed with Henry at his Knightsbridge home. He was taken ill and was treated by Dr Matthew Baillie, who was also physician to the Prince Regent.7 Baillie told the Prince that Austen, whose novels he greatly admired, was in London, and she was invited by the Revd James Clarke, the Prince’s chaplain and librarian at Carlton House, to visit the Library. In fact, Austen was given a tour of most of Carlton House. On the Prince’s authority, Clarke invited Austen to dedicate her next novel to him. Austen, who unsurprisingly held the notoriously profligate Prince in low esteem, was reluctant to do this, but was persuaded by Henry and Cassandra, her sister, that she had little choice but to accede to what was in fact a royal command. The first edition of Emma, published on 23 December 1815 (though dated 1816), duly appeared with the invited Dedication (‘By His Royal Highness’s Permission’). It was a sign that the still anonymous novelist had achieved some fashionable status.

Austen’s decision to publish with John Murray led, indirectly, to the most considered and significant review that any of her novels received in her lifetime. It was published in Murray’s own journal, the Quarterly Review, and was written — clearly at the publisher’s request —  by Walter Scott. When he wrote it, Scott was a renowned poet, but also a highly successful novelist: his first novel, Waverley, had appeared, to acclaim, in 1814, and he had recently published his second, Guy Mannering. Though never naming her, Scott writes of Austen as a writer with a distinctive oeuvre (he also discusses Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice), skilled beyond all her contemporaries in ‘the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life’.8 In Emma he found ‘the merits of the Flemish school of painting’.9 ‘The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision that delights the reader.’ Scott’s praise is the more striking because the brilliance of Emma was hardly noticed by others. Contemporary reviews merely distributed some mild compliments: Emma was found ‘inoffensive and well principled’, providing ‘harmless amusement’ and written in language that ‘is chaste and correct’.10 Austen sent a copy to Maria Edgeworth, whose novel Belinda she singles out for admiration in Northanger Abbey, but Edgeworth, who had thought highly of Pride and Prejudice, found ‘no story in it, except that Miss Emma found that the man whom she designed for Harriet’s lover was an admirer of her own’ and was exasperated by the details of Mr Woodhouse’s fussiness.

Though Austen did have a few eloquent advocates through the nineteenth century, she was largely ignored by other great novelists. George Eliot was an exception, but partly because she had Austen’s work urged on her by her partner G. H. Lewes, who was one of its leading advocates in the mid-nineteenth century. Even when her popularity surged, following the publication of her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of her in 1869, it was not accompanied by a critical acknowledgement of her inventiveness or technical accomplishment. It is notable that the greatest fictional theorist-practitioner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Henry James, failed to recognize her formal sophistication. ‘For signal examples of what composition, distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere.’11 James’s dismissal is all the more remarkable because Austen so clearly presages his own interest in subordinating narrative to the limited views of his characters. Yet he was not alone in missing Austen’s technical audacity. The critical reputation of Austen’s fiction lagged behind its popularity, which had grown steadily. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that academic critics began recognizing the narrative sophistication of Emma, in particular. Wayne Booth’s influential The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) devoted an entire section to ‘Control of Distance in Jane Austen’s Emma’. Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) set passages from Emma alongside others from Madame Bovary as comparably skilful specimens of ‘psycho-narration’.12

Cohn’s term refers to what is now usually called free indirect style or free indirect speech, the means by which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. It was only in the early twentieth century that critics began agreeing on a name for it, a translation from the original French: style indirect libre. This term was first coined as late as 1912, by the Swiss linguist Charles Bally, yet it names a technique employed by writers of fiction for much of the nineteenth century. It is generally recognized that Austen was the first novelist writing in English consistently to use it. There are flickers of it in the work of some earlier novelists, like Fanny Burney. It might also be found in fiction by Goethe, pre-dating Austen, but not known by her. She had no models to follow. As Roy Pascal observes in The Dual Voice, one of the standard accounts of the technique, ‘It is astonishing that so rich and sure a use of free indirect speech is to be found in Jane Austen’s novels, when she had so slight a tradition to build on.’13 She had begun employing it in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, where the narrative frequently settles into the patterns of its heroine Elinor’s uncertainties and intuitions. She developed it further in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. In Emma she employs free indirect style with a sophistication that has rarely been equalled.

We begin encountering the powerful influence of the technique in the third chapter of the novel, where we are told of the heroine’s growing interest in Harriet Smith. Emma does not think the young woman clever, we read, but does find her ‘altogether very engaging’ —  and with that Emma-like turn of phrase, we are pitched into a description that succumbs to Emma’s self-regard (p. 19). Harriet is willing to talk, we are told,

and yet so far from pushing, shewing so proper and becoming a deference, seeming so pleasantly grateful for being admitted to Hartfield, and so artlessly impressed by the appearance of every thing in so superior a style to what she had been used to, that she must have good sense, and deserve encouragement.

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 3

The repetition of ‘so . . .’ brings to life Emma’s pleasure in Harriet’s submissiveness, while those terms of judgement — ‘proper’, ‘becoming’, ‘superior’ — catch her complacency. That decisive ‘must’ is the clinching evidence of Emma’s prejudices at work on the narration. She is so gratified by Harriet’s ‘deference’ that she is determined to credit her with ‘good sense’. Such a use of ‘must’ is a special trick of Austen’s free indirect style. Later in the same paragraph we hear that the Martins, the family of tenant farmers, with whom Harriet has been staying, ‘though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm’. Emma has heard of them from Mr Knightley, their landlord: ‘she knew Mr. Knightley thought highly of them — but they must be coarse and unpolished’, and therefore the wrong company for Harriet. Each time ‘must’ is used it marks the pressure of Emma’s wishes. There is, needless to say, no evidence for any of these judgements.

At one point, as if allowing herself a joke about the very technique that she is exploring, Austen uses free indirect style precisely in order to assert Emma’s confidence in her own perceptiveness. Jane Fairfax is insisting on leaving the party at Donwell to walk back to Highbury and asks Emma not to try to dissuade her or to tell anyone of her intentions. She craves solitariness. Emma is understanding. ‘She saw it all’ (p. 279). The statement carries the emphasis of her new-found sympathy for Jane, whom previously she has never managed to like. Seeing her patronized by Mrs Elton, knowing that she has to endure the company of her prattling aunt, Miss Bates, Emma finds herself for the first time ‘entering into her feelings’. Except that this is an illusion. She knows almost nothing of Jane Fairfax’s feelings. Far from seeing it all, Emma sees hardly anything. In fact, Jane Fairfax has been waiting for the return of Frank Churchill, the man she loves. Despite his assurances, he has not come. What is more, she has long been tormented by the attentions that he has devoted to Emma, supposedly in order to conceal his real reasons for being in Highbury. ‘She saw it all’ dramatizes Emma’s unfounded faith in her own discernment. Yet the first-time reader might hardly be able to make out how wrong this is. We only find out about Jane Fairfax’s state of mind at the Donwell gathering later in the novel, via the long letter that Frank writes to Mrs Weston, explaining his conduct.

Free indirect style is used with such assurance in this novel that it is often possible to mistake a judgement made by Emma for one being offered by the narrator. Sometimes, perhaps especially on first reading, the filtering of narration through Emma’s dominant consciousness is hardly perceptible and easily confused with the perspective of the author. Here we are introduced to the Cole family.

The Coles had been settled some years in Highbury, and were very good sort of people — friendly, liberal, and unpretending; but, on the other hand, they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel. (p. 158)

The slide from fact to judgement and then (via ‘unpretending’) to unchecked snobbery is only just evident. Later, when we are finding out some facts about Mr Elton’s fiancé, Miss Hawkins, we might hardly notice the stir of Emma’s own prejudices. ‘She brought no name, no blood, no alliance’ (p. 140). ‘Blood’ is one of Emma’s words. When she arrives at Donwell Abbey for the strawberry picking, we are told that ‘Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding’ (p. 275). The coupling of ‘blood and understanding’ here is unsettling, and surely meant to be so. ‘Blood’ comes back again in the last chapter, when we discover that Harriet’s father is in fact a ‘tradesman’. ‘Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for!’ (p. 370) You might almost think that this was an authorial exclamation — but the next sentence goes on in a way that lets you hear that this is Emma’s thought process. ‘It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman: but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley — or for the Churchills — or even for Mr. Elton! — The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.’ Those metaphors of taint and stain give you Emma’s snobbery at its most pernicious.

Sometimes, the evidence of Emma’s controlling consciousness may be light; sometimes the narration plunges us into the very drama of her thoughts. That pattern of exclamations used in her review of her conduct in the immediate aftermath of Mr Elton’s proposal is paralleled elsewhere. The last part of Volume III, Chapter XI, is thick with question marks, dashes, and exclamation marks, as we follow the path of her anguished introspection. One thought will rush into her head — before the next one arrives to cancel it.

How Harriet could ever have had the presumption to raise her thoughts to Mr. Knightley! — How she could dare to fancy herself the chosen of such a man till actually assured of it! — But Harriet was less humble, had fewer scruples than formerly. — Her inferiority, whether of mind or situation, seemed little felt. — She had seemed more sensible of Mr. Elton’s being to stoop in marrying her, than she now seemed of Mr. Knightley’s. — Alas! was not that her own doing too? (p. 318)

‘Presumption’ is one of Emma’s special words (like ‘becoming’ or ‘degradation’), implying her sense of other characters’ proper place in the social order There has been some debate about whether the punctuation in Austen’s published fiction was decided by the author, or whether it might sometimes have been the responsibility of an editor working for one of her publishers.14 It is hard to believe that Austen was not responsible for the unconventional use of exclamation marks and long dashes in a passage like this, where Emma’s troubled thought processes are being enacted. The passage comes in a chapter in which Emma realizes the truth about her own feelings for Mr Knightley and goes on to consider the dread possibility that he might return Harriet’s affections (pp. 318–20). Alive with her incredulous thoughts, it is thick with dashes and exclamation marks.

At their most directly expressed, Emma’s thoughts force their way into quotation. The most memorable example, at once comic and poignant, is also the shortest, ‘the spontaneous burst of Emma’s feelings’ after Harriet has gone through all the recent evidence of Mr Knightley’s attentions to her. ‘Oh, God! that I had never seen her!’ (p. 316) Her compliant protégée has become her nemesis. Elsewhere, Mrs Elton has a special power to provoke Emma’s silent outbursts, as after her very first visit to Hartfield.

‘Insufferable woman!’ was her immediate exclamation. ‘Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable! Knightley! — I could not have believed it. Knightley! — never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! —  and discover that he is a gentleman! A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery . . .’ (p. 213)

‘Exclamation’ may be the word used, but we find out that all this and more ‘ran . . . glibly through her thoughts’. None of it is actually spoken. Such direct quotation gives a sense of the eruption of her thoughts, as if we have her responses before she has cared to restrain or order them. There is a striking use of the technique during the dinner party at Hartfield. Emma is about to venture an opinion about Frank Churchill’s handwriting (based on his letter, so widely circulated) when she hesitates, seeing that Mrs Weston is otherwise occupied. A tumble of thoughts passes through her mind.

‘Now, how am I going to introduce him? — Am I unequal to speaking his name at once before all these people? Is it necessary for me to use any roundabout phrase? — Your Yorkshire friend — your correspondent in Yorkshire; — that would be the way, I suppose, if I were very bad. — No, I can pronounce his name without the smallest distress. I certainly get better and better. — Now for it.’ (p. 228)

We have direct access to her private thoughts. Yet the re-reader of the novel will know that even here Emma is deluding herself. She believes that she feels tender on the subject of Frank Churchill, yet in truth she does not. The slightly tetchy exchange with Mr Knightley that immediately follows, when she praises Frank Churchill’s ‘hand’, reveals much less directly where true attachment tends.

Emma is a novel about love. Its matchmaking protagonist fancies that she is alert to the ‘symptoms of love’ in others. (The word symptoms is used seven times in the novel; on six of these occasions it is to refer to the supposed signs of a person being in love.) Emma’s absolute ignorance of love is shown by the ease with which the word slips into her thoughts. ‘This will bring a great increase of love on each side,’ she thinks, when Mr Elton meets her and Harriet as they return from visiting the poor (p. 70). ‘What a strange thing love is!’ she exclaims to herself when she finds that Mr Elton is accompanying the Hartfield party to dinner at the Westons, even though Harriet is ill at home (p. 87). At her first meeting with Jane Fairfax, recently arrived in Highbury, she swiftly convinces herself of Jane’s likely attachment to Mr Dixon, her best friend’s new husband. ‘If it were love, it might be simple, single, successless love on her side alone’ (p. 128). On each of these occasions her inferences are about as wrong as wrong can be. She supposes herself an expert in the ways of love and is most deluded when she applies the word to herself. ‘I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall,’ she absurdly announces to Harriet (p. 67). Then Frank Churchill arrives. Encouraged by his own pretence of interest in her, she is soon fantasizing about the near love affair between herself and the notionally smitten newcomer.

Emma makes out a thoroughgoing drama for herself, imagining how she will soon have to ‘throw coldness into her air’, to save him from too public a demonstration of his love for her at the Coles’ dinner party (p.163). When he is summoned back to Yorkshire by his adoptive parents, he comes to say his reluctant farewell to her (though only, we notice, after calling on Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax) and as he hesitates on the brink of saying ‘something absolutely serious’ she supposes that he is near to declaring his love for her (p. 200). She is in no doubt about the reason for his awkwardness. ‘He was more in love with her than Emma had supposed.’ Nothing is actually said, but once he has left, under the influence of his apparent ‘preference of herself’, she begins to think that ‘she must be a little in love with him, in spite of every previous determination against it’ (p. 201). In matters of the heart, she is an ingénue. She quickly decides that her prevailing feeling of listlessness, with Frank Churchill gone and the planned ball indefinitely postponed, can only mean one thing. ‘I must be in love.’

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 4

Having managed to be so wrong about others’ feelings, she now manages entirely to mistake her own. ‘Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love’ (p. 202). Her very indulgence of this conviction reveals its implausibility, for she delights in imaging the scenarios in which, when Frank Churchill declares himself to her, she turns him down. She herself sees that this might be evidence that she does not have a ‘strong attachment’ to him, but this thought sets her off on a dramatic monologue in which she congratulates herself on being ‘quite enough in love’, a monologue every turn of which is self-deceiving. For the re-reader of Emma, there are all the comic pleasures of dramatic irony. ‘He is undoubtedly very much in love —  everything denotes it — very much in love indeed!’ (p. 202) She is right, but not in the way that she imagines. There is then a gap of two months before his imminent return to Highbury is announced (Mrs Churchill has been persuaded to travel to London). On hearing the news, Emma examines her own ‘agitation’ (p. 241). A little reflection persuades her that her agitated feelings are on behalf of Frank. If he, ‘who had undoubtedly been always so much the most in love of the two’, were to return with ‘the same warmth of feeling’, it might be ‘very distressing’. When he does return, it is clear that he is ‘less in love than he had been’, though she discerns his ‘dread of her returning power’ (p. 242). All this is illusion: self-centred and hilariously self-important.

All Emma’s illusions about love will mount to one of the most beautifully managed moments of anagnorisis in fiction: her discovery that she loves Mr Knightley. Austen has carefully allowed almost every possible match between marriageable characters to be proposed by someone or other — except this one. Mr and Mrs Weston have long thought of Frank and Emma; Miss Bates has fancied a marriage between Mr Elton and Emma; Mrs Weston speculates about a match between Mr Knightley and Jane Fairfax (and we find that Mr Cole has done so too); Harriet, of course, comes to think of becoming Mrs Knightley. It is central to Austen’s purposes that, when Emma discovers that she loves Mr Knightley, it is with both certainty and utter surprise. ‘It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’ (p. 313) It is a famous sentence because it so wonderfully reflects the heroine’s character. The use of free indirect style is consummate: even at this lowest moment, Emma bends the world to her desires.

By having her heroine discover what lies at ‘her own heart’ so belatedly, Austen has tempted some readers to doubt the love between the two main characters. Such doubts are surely misplaced.

One way of seeing how carefully Austen has prepared for Emma’s discovery and Mr Knightley’s declaration is to compare these with the dénouement of her previous novel, Mansfield Park. Here Austen faced a problem that seems to have influenced the brilliantly unorthodox love story in Emma. The heroine of the earlier novel, Fanny Price, is secretly in love with her cousin, Edmund Bertram. Her passion is so well-concealed that Edmund himself never suspects it, causing her frequent pain by his imperceptiveness. At the novel’s end, Edmund, having lost his illusions about Mary Crawford, must come to realize that he loves Fanny. The only way in which Austen can manage the transformation is by a witty sleight of hand. She will not tell us how long it took.

I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.15

She is making a joke out of a difficulty: Edmund’s affection for Fanny up to this point has been nothing but brotherly. In Emma, in contrast, the possibility of a change from friendship to love is ingeniously woven into the narrative — unforeseen by Emma, but not at all unforeseeable.

‘How I catch myself out!’ (p. 214) Emma exclaims to herself in one of her silent soliloquies, when she finds herself thinking of Frank Churchill. ‘Always the first person to be thought of!’ In fact, these exclamations end an internal monologue that has begun with her indignation at Mrs Elton’s over-familiar references to Mr Knightley as ‘Knightley’. The attentive reader will notice, as she does not, how it is invariably Mr Knightley who is really ‘the first person to be thought of’. Each example of his presence in her thoughts is innocent enough to pass without notice, yet cumulatively we sense his pull on her. When Harriet, who has preserved absurd little relics of Mr Elton’s presence, is recalling how he once left behind his blunt pencil on a table, Emma, now in the same room, envisions the scene. ‘I perfectly remember it. — Stop; Mr. Knightley was standing just here, was not he? I have an idea he was standing just here’ (p. 260). Harriet merely recalls where Mr Elton was sitting. Only when she believes herself about to lose him to Harriet does Emma realize, as the attentive reader would already have discerned, that ‘her happiness’ has always depended ‘on being first with Mr. Knightley’ (pp. 318–19). Virginia Woolf, a writer peculiarly alive to Austen’s gifts, admired the economy with which Austen could dramatize her heroine’s half-conscious expression of her feelings for Mr Knightley. Woolf seized on the very end of the chapter narrating the ball at the Crown, when Mr Knightley asks Emma whom she is to dance with next, and she comes as close as a woman can to asking a man to dance.

She hesitated a moment, and then replied, ‘With you, if you will ask me.’  
‘Will you?’ said he, offering his hand.
‘Indeed I will. You have shewn that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.’  ‘Brother and sister! no, indeed.’ (p. 254)

Contrasting Austen’s economy with George Eliot’s more garrulous narrative technique, Woolf observes that she compresses ‘the heart of the scene’ within ‘one sentence’.16

The sentence she means is Emma’s ‘With you, if you will ask me’. Yet the exchange also dramatizes Mr Knightley’s feelings for Emma, his significant exclamation bringing the chapter emphatically to a close. It would be possible to read Emma attending only to the ‘symptoms’ of Mr Knightley’s attraction to Emma. Perhaps the first infallible sign of it is his irritable condemnation of Frank Churchill’s non-appearance in Highbury, in a lengthy exchange with Emma. ‘You seem determined to think ill of him,’ Emma observes, to Mr Knightley’s evident displeasure (p. 116). It is an artfully contrived dialogue: most of Mr Knightley’s observations about Frank Churchill’s excuses for not visiting his father and stepmother are plausible and turn out to be accurate. Yet there is something extra in his ‘vexation’ that only takes clear shape when one re-reads the novel. Emma ‘could not comprehend why he should be angry’, but perhaps we can. Even though Frank Churchill has not yet appeared, Emma’s interest in him stirs something like jealousy, and jealousy is the sign of desire. When he arrives, Mr Knightley naturally takes against him from the beginning. ‘Hum! just the trifling, silly fellow I took him for’ (p. 158). Once Frank and Emma begin something like a flirtation, Mr Knightley’s aversion increases. But we must see all this at the edge of Emma’s frame, as it were, for she has no comprehension of his feelings. We perceive through her imperceptiveness, glimpsing what Mr Knightley has been feeling long before he declares himself. Made uneasy by Mrs Weston’s thought that Mr Knightley might be amorously interested in Jane Fairfax, Emma archly teases him about being her admirer.

Mr Knightley was hard at work upon the lower buttons of his thick leather gaiters, and either the exertion of getting them together, or some other cause, brought the colour into his face, as he answered . . . (p. 220)

That ‘or some other cause’ is as near as Austen will get to signalling his likely feelings.

Mr Knightley is the person whose voice often echoes in Emma’s head. He also has the privilege of being the only character apart from Emma who has a chapter narrated from his point of view. There are several stretches of the novel where Emma is absent, but they are all essentially passages of dialogue. In Volume III, Chapter V, however, something extraordinary happens. We are woken from the spell of Emma’s consciousness. What must have been this carefully planned shift of viewpoint opens with an ironical expression of perplexity (‘for some reason best known to himself’) about Mr Knightley’s dislike of Frank Churchill (p. 263). No sooner have we been told that the narrator cannot guess Mr Knightley’s motive than we are taken into his consciousness for the entire chapter. ‘He began to suspect him of some double dealing in his pursuit of Emma.’ The events that follow obey one rule of this novel, that in everything trivial is the evidence of deep, concealed feelings. Frank Churchill makes his ‘blunder’, when he shows that he knows that Mr Perry is thinking of getting a carriage. Crucially, it occurs when Emma has left the frame and is ‘out of hearing’ (p. 265). Miss Bates babbles on, unconsciously revealing the truth (Mrs Perry told it as ‘a secret’ to her mother, who told her and Jane, who must have mentioned it to Frank in one of their secret letters). Sharp-eyed Mr Knightley sees in Frank Churchill’s face ‘confusion suppressed or laughed away’, but Jane Fairfax eludes him; she is ‘behind, and too busy with her shawl’ (p. 266). When the characters, including Emma, enter Hartfield and sit around the table to play a game, making words from children’s letters, Mr Knightley is ‘so placed as to see them all’. We watch through his eyes as Frank Churchill makes words (blunder is the first) that seem to communicate things to Jane Fairfax. Free indirect style is now used to filter narration through Mr Knightley’s suspicious consciousness. ‘These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick. It was a child’s play, chosen to conceal a deeper game on Frank Churchill’s part’ (p. 267).

When the company breaks up for the evening, Mr Knightley remains behind and we remain with his thoughts. The strength of his feelings bursts through, Austen using the same techniques for dramatizing his consciousness that she has so far used only for Emma’s: ‘he must — yes, he certainly must, as a friend — an anxious friend — give Emma some hint, ask her some question’. That deft repetition of ‘friend’ gives us his effort to convince himself of his proper motives. He does put to Emma the possibility of a clandestine relationship between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, only to have her rebut him with absolute assurance. He is silenced. The chapter is true to the narrative logic of Emma, according to which there are no absolute surprises: every unexpected eventuality has already somewhere been proposed as a possibility. When she confidently pooh-poohs Mr Knightley’s suspicions, Emma is wrong again — but she has had the chance not to be. At the very end of the chapter, he leaves for ‘the coolness and solitude’ of his own home, and the description of events from his viewpoint is over (p. 269). For a while, we stepped aside from ‘Emma’s errors of imagination’, but it was only an interlude.

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 5

This shift away from the heroine’s viewpoint alerts us to one of the special pleasures offered by repeat readings of the novel: its invitations to imagine what other people are thinking and saying, especially about Emma herself. Returning to the novel you can see how Emma’s flirtation with Frank Churchill appears to Jane Fairfax, or imagine what Mr Elton must have been saying to his new wife about Emma. Highbury itself pulses with gossip and speculation, the ‘tittle-tattle of Highbury’ that Emma affects to scorn. ‘Highbury gossips! — Tiresome wretches!’ she exclaims to Mr Knightley (p. 46), but the communal chat, just out of earshot of the heroine, makes ‘Highbury’ — something between a town and a village — a character in the book. Amongst the few passages where we can hear Austen’s narratorial voice entirely independent of her main character are those where she drily reports the hopes and disappointments of ‘the Highbury world’, or ‘Highbury in general’. When she does this, Emma’s scorn seems not entirely misplaced, for Highbury is easily deluded. On her arrival, for instance, Mrs Elton is taken to be ‘as agreeable as she professed herself’ (a phrase that might have been Emma’s, but is not), and her praise ‘passed from one mouth to another’ (p. 215). The community is sustained by ‘the daily interchange of news’. Mr Weston tells his wife that his son’s engagement to Jane Fairfax will soon be widely known for ‘such things . . . always got about’ — partly because of his own gossiping inclinations (p. 321).

We never leave Emma to sample conversations from the ‘Highbury world’, as we would do if this were a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot. This world is thickly peopled, and yet our not seeing or hearing those people is an important consequence of the Emma-centredness of the novel. No Austen novel has so many named characters whom we never really meet. Farmer Mitchell, Mrs Perry, Mrs Goddard, Mrs Martin, Miss Nash, Miss Prince, Miss Richardson, the two Abbotts, Ann Cox, William Cox, Mrs Wallis (the baker’s wife), William Larkins, Mrs Hodges, Mrs Stokes, Dr and Mrs Hughes, Mr and Mrs Otway and their daughters and sons, Miss Bickerton, John Saunders, John Abdy. And then there is Mr Perry. The Highbury apothecary is a busy man, evidently doing very well professionally in this haven of hypochondriacs (if Mrs Perry is thinking of a carriage, he must be very affluent indeed). We keep glimpsing him in passing: in the passage where Emma looks out from the door of the milliner’s shop, while Harriet is taking an age choosing her purchase, naturally she sees ‘Mr. Perry walking hastily by’ (p. 179). He is oddly important to the plot, so that, for instance, it is the prolongation of his visit to Mr Woodhouse, who is feeling depressed because of the unseasonal weather, that allows Emma to suggest another turn around the garden to Mr Knightley, which becomes his opportunity to declare himself. Characters are always seeing him or mentioning him. He is frequently quoted, most of all by Mr Woodhouse, but also by Miss Bates, Mrs Weston, and Emma herself. Yet he never actually speaks in the novel. It is Austen’s buried joke. Mr Perry’s business of dispensing reassurance and cordials to his anxious clients prospers most when he echoes what they say to him.

Just as the novel mentions a host of minor characters living in Highbury, so it mentions a great range of their occupations. A reader who wished to do so could infer much about the economy of Highbury from the novel’s passing references to the activities of its tradesmen and -women, shopkeepers, clerks, ostlers and innkeepers, domestic servants, and agricultural workers. Highbury is an invented place, and certainly much larger than Chawton, the village in which Austen herself lived, yet it is as if she had each aspect of its economic life in her head. It is a place where disparities of wealth and status are very clear. Some people are poor. Early in the novel, Emma pays a ‘charitable visit’ with Harriet to ‘a poor sick family’ who live locally (p. 66). She listens to their woes, but also gives them some money. Modern readers might find such conduct condescending; contemporary readers would probably have thought it admirable. Much less admirable is Mr Elton’s readiness to defer the visit that he says he was going to make to the same family (but was he?) for the sake of some gallant conversation with the two young ladies. As the vicar, he would indeed be responsible for administering parish relief to the deserving poor. We get a telling glimpse of his powers when Miss Bates tells Emma of an old man whose son has come to Mr Elton looking for such relief for his bedridden father.

Miss Bates’s own relative impoverishment is carefully indicated. The daughter of a former vicar, living in a couple of rented rooms above a shop with her widowed mother, she is on the line between gentility and poverty. Austen reveals the pinch of her circumstances with the slightest of touches, as when we hear her reaction to the news that the kitchen chimney needs sweeping, or when she talks of paying Mr Perry for attending on Jane, even if he offers to waive his bill. We should flinch when, telling Emma about her niece’s deeply unwanted employment as a governess, she exclaims, ‘And her salary! — I really cannot venture to name her salary to you, Miss Woodhouse’ (p. 293). It will certainly be a tiny fraction of what Emma receives, without any exertion, as the interest on her wealth. Mr Knightley pronounces the fate of Miss Bates with flat honesty. ‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more’ (p. 288). He does so in response to Emma’s mockery of Miss Bates during the Box Hill jaunt. With all her wealth, Emma can be careless of the ways in which money, or the lack of it, determines a person’s position in society, and indeed a person’s position in a conversation. Austen is never careless about this.

Miss Bates is a brilliant creation, her idiolect — her unique way of speaking — being rendered in a manner unlike anything in fiction before it. She speaks in a kind of torrent of platitudes and circumstantial details, hardly able to complete a sentence without veering off into a different trivial observation. Austen’s rendition of this is highly unusual in excluding anything that anyone else might be saying. Near the end of one of Miss Bates’s fractured monologues, as she arrives at the ball at the Crown, we glimpse, in dizzy passing, some of the Highbury characters who must be thronging the ballroom, but who only exist in the moment of Miss Bates addressing them. These people must also be speaking — she greets them and responds to their greetings — but they do not get a word in to her stream of words, from which all replies or interruptions have been shut out. This is comic entertainment, but there is something more in her prattle. When Walter Scott complained of the ‘minute detail’ with which Miss Bates’s monologues were rendered, he, like others since, was entirely missing what Austen was revealing. Buried in all that Miss Bates says are the clues to what is really going on between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill — all the more buried because Miss Bates herself does not know the significance of what she reveals.

As one of Austen’s best critics has put it, ‘if I wanted to know what happened in Highbury on any particular day I should go to Miss Bates’.17 ‘What is before me, I see,’ she artlessly declares (p. 135). When she tells Emma at such length of the invitation that Jane has had to stay with her friend in Ireland and the cold that she has had for a couple of months (‘A long time, is not it, for a cold to hang upon her?’), which has meant her coming to stay with her aunt instead, she discloses how the two lovers have arranged to meet up. When she chatters about receiving a note from Mrs Cole, she lets us glimpse Jane by her front door, eager to see if the caller is the person for whose arrival she yearns. When she bores Emma by remembering just how Mr Elton was called away from tea with a request for poor relief, returning to pass on John the ostler’s trivial information about a chaise being ordered to Randall’s, she unknowingly reveals why her niece, assuming from Frank Churchill’s sudden departure that her hopes are at an end, has suddenly accepted Mrs Elton’s offer of the post of governess with her friends, the Smallridges. Emma detects none of this; like those who have to endure Miss Bates’s chatter, the first-time reader can be forgiven for not detecting it either.

The story of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, concealed in plain sight, is so cunningly hidden that critics of the novel’s supposed plotlessness have shared the heroine’s imperceptiveness. Though he thought highly of Emma, John Murray worried that it lacked ‘incident and Romance’.18 Austen’s fellow novelist Susan Ferrier thought it ‘excellent’, despite the fact that ‘there is no story whatever, and the heroine is not better than other people’.19 Such reservations are peculiarly misplaced, given the devious complexity of the novel’s plotting, which owes much to the manipulativeness and ingenuity of Frank Churchill. He must appear to come to Highbury for the sake of his father and stepmother, and then to take a relaxed delight in Highbury society, when all he seeks is the company of the woman he secretly loves. He has to communicate with her indirectly, as when he speaks to Emma, but for Jane’s ears, of the ‘true affection’ that must have prompted the gift of the piano (p. 186). He covers his tracks by confiding criticisms of Jane Fairfax’s looks to Emma, and encouraging her fantasy that she has been enjoying a secret romance with Mr Dixon, her best friend’s husband. Everything is for one end. He even goes to the lengths of promoting a ball, solely in order to get to dance with Jane Fairfax a couple of times.

We need to escape Emma’s consciousness to see what he is up to. Emma is shopping with Harriet and spots him and Mrs Weston on their way to visit the Bateses. They cross the road to speak to her. Mrs Weston remarks that her stepson has assured her of her promise that she would come that morning to hear their new piano. The wary reader, though not the heroine, might sense the implications when she adds, ‘I was not aware of it myself’ (p. 179). Yet, without the knowledge of Frank Churchill’s secret engagement to Jane Fairfax, the details of his manoeuvring will not be obvious. When Mrs Weston later returns to the shop with Miss Bates to invite Emma in, do we immediately ask what is now going on in the Bates’s home? Frank and Jane are still there, accompanied only by the elderly Mrs Bates. Without her glasses, which Frank is supposedly occupied in mending, the old lady has nothing to do but sleep. As the party, now including Emma, noisily ascends the stairs, Miss Bates talking all the way, do we wonder what is happening inside the apartment? We see everything through Emma’s eyes, and as the door opens there is Mrs Bates, slumbering by the fire, Frank Churchill, ‘deedily occupied about her spectacles’, and the ever inaccessible Jane Fairfax ‘standing with her back to them, intent on her pianoforté’ (p. 184). John Wiltshire’s reading is irrefutable.

So they have just time to break away from each other and to take up these positions, though Jane’s back being turned suggests that she needs a little more time than Frank to recover — perhaps from his embraces — or to deceive, as he does, with aplomb.20

It has often been said that there are no amorous kisses or embraces in Austen’s novels (film and TV adaptations of those novels have not been so chaste); here, however, utterly unsuspected by the novel’s heroine, we arrive only moments after the two lovers have been in each other’s arms.

Emma (Oxford University Press 2022)
Introduction by John Mullan - part 6

Frank Churchill’s power to deceive seems more unsettling on each re-reading of the novel. ‘I thought I knew him,’ says Mrs Weston, and we can feel her sense of having been duped (p. 304). He is an accomplished flatterer, who knows how Emma loves to be complimented on her judgement. ‘Oh! Miss Woodhouse, why are you always so right?’ (p. 199) He is only echoing what others say. ‘Whatever you say always comes to pass,’ sighs her father (p. 10). ‘You understand every thing,’ declares Harriet Smith, her artless minion (p. 60). ‘Whatever you say is always right’ (p. 59). In fact, Emma’s fate is to be ‘proved to have been universally mistaken’ (p. 317). Yet our interest in her is sustained because she is also right about things. She is right about the ‘insufferable’ Mrs Elton, and few readers will resist her private exclamations against this interloper and rival. Mrs Elton’s tireless self-descriptions are a rich source of pleasure for us: ‘Nobody can be more devoted to home than I am. I was quite a proverb for it at Maple Grove’ (p. 210); ‘I have the greatest dislike to the idea of being over-trimmed — quite a horror of finery’ (p. 232); ‘I am a great advocate for timidity’ (p. 216). There is the occasional echo of Emma’s own habits of speech, her own assertiveness, in Mrs Elton’s absurd declarations about herself. Naturally, Emma cannot see the ways in which Mrs Elton might be a distorted likeness of herself.

Austen lets us see how her heroine is sometimes right just where her wishes pull her in a different direction. Emma’s perceptiveness and her deludedness are beautifully entangled early in the novel, when she reads the letter that Mr Robert Martin has written to Harriet Smith, proposing marriage. She begins to tell the anxiously expectant Harriet that it is ‘so good a letter’ that it must surely have been written with the help of one of his sisters, but almost instantly corrects herself, acknowledging that its style is masculine and that it reads as if expressing directly its author’s sentiments (p. 40). The correction is not a ploy, for Harriet will believe whatever Emma tells her. Emma is acknowledging what is real: the letter expresses ‘good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling’. Naturally, this will not prevent her coaxing Harriet into refusing the proposal. Once Harriet has been braced to do so, Emma tells her that marriage to Mr Robert Martin would have confined her to ‘the society of the illiterate and vulgar’. This entirely contradicts what she has just seen in that letter; she has returned to her prejudices. She has worked hard to defeat her better self. Later in the novel, she listens to Harriet’s breathless account of having met Mr Robert

Martin and his sister in the shop, where Harriet has taken shelter from the rain, and she cannot but discern the truth. ‘The young man's conduct, and his sister's, seemed the result of real feeling . . . As Harriet described it, there had been an interesting mixture of wounded affection and genuine delicacy in their behaviour’ (p. 138). It takes her several more sentences to argue herself into the baseless conviction that the Martins were motivated by disappointed ambition, before dismissing Harriet’s account as unreliable (when her naivety in fact makes her the most trustworthy of narrators).

It is when Emma talks about Mr Knightley that she is likeliest to be right; it is often when she looks at him that she perceives things rightly. In the wake of the Box Hill débâcle, he calls on her before departing for London to stay with his brother. Though she does not know the true reason for his departure — pained jealousy at the attentions of Emma and Frank Churchill to each other — we can suddenly rely on what she discerns from his manner. At first, he seems not to have forgiven her; then, when Mr Woodhouse tells him that she has visited Miss Bates, there is ‘a glow of regard’, a wordless sense that ‘his eyes received the truth from her’s, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured’ (p. 296). Here she is not deluded. He takes her hand and seems about to kiss it — an extraordinary thing (no heroine is kissed by the man she loves, even in this formal manner, in any Austen novel). Dashes enact the jolts of her thoughts, as she thinks he will do it, sees he will not, wonders why, thinks he should have done, is sure he wanted to, is pleased at the thought. It is an episode that deepens with re-reading. Emma, detecting the evidence of ‘perfect amity’ in his behaviour towards her, misses both his jealousy and her own awakening feelings. In her confused certainty about the near-kiss (did she offer her hand?), in her regret that he had been waiting half an hour before she returned from the Bateses (‘It was a pity that she had not come back earlier!’), she shows her affection for him without quite being conscious of it. Yet she is near to understanding.

She cannot represent him wrongly. We see this most clearly at a dreadful moment. Harriet has just told her that she has reason to think that Mr Knightley returns her affection. She presents the evidence of his increasing attention to herself, appealing to Emma ‘to say whether she had not good ground for hope’ (p. 316). The appeal is the more painful for Emma because Harriet guilelessly assures her that she would never have been presumptuous enough to think of Mr Knightley as a prospective suitor if Emma had not encouraged her to do so. In response, Emma makes ‘the utmost exertion’ and speaks the truth. Mr Knightley is ‘the last man in the world, who would intentionally give any woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really does’. She is right — though not in the way she thinks. She will find that he has unintentionally given Harriet the idea that he is attached to her, that this idea turns out to be ‘a delusion, as complete a delusion as any of her own’ (p. 331).

Emma has her period of torment, her punishment for ‘the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under’ (p. 316). For two days (and most of two chapters) she lives — first self-accusingly, then despondently — with the thought that she has lost the man she loves. The narrative sticks close to her pained introspection. Her punishment ends when she earns her reprieve. She is walking in the garden with Mr Knightley, who wishes to tell her something. Dreading an announcement of his attachment to Harriet, she stops him. But then, seeing his ‘deep mortification’, she thinks again. ‘Emma could not bear to give him pain’ (p. 329). Her kindness brings an end to her misapprehension: he declares his love for her. She has escaped her final, almost fatal, misconception (we are left in no doubt that her initial ‘injunction to caution and silence’ would have forever prevented his declaration). The scene is an epitome of Austen’s most unusual achievement in Emma: to lead us through the ‘clever’ protagonist’s nearly disastrous mistakes into a peculiar satisfaction with her happiness. The author’s throwaway remark, recorded by her nephew, that she would be the only person to like this heroine is a kind of dare to the reader. It bespeaks Austen’s extraordinary confidence in her narrative ingenuity; she knows that she can allow us to live out — and wince at — her protagonist’s errors. Emma’s ‘vanity’, as Mr Knightley calls it, is that of supposing she can know what other people think and feel. If we join Austen by ‘liking’ her heroine, it is perhaps because we recognize this vanity in ourselves. Some first-time readers might find her exasperating. The reader who returns to the novel is likelier to think, ‘Emma Woodhouse, c’est moi’.