Emma

Summary

Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one, is the clever, handsome and wealthy mistress of Hartfield, a house in the Surrey village of Highbury, where she keeps company with her fond, fretful and health-obsessed widowed father. When her governess and friend Miss Taylor marries the genial widower Mr. Weston, Emma credits herself with the match and resolves to arrange more. She takes up Harriet Smith, a pretty, good-natured parlour boarder of unknown parentage at Mrs. Goddard's school, talks her out of accepting a proposal from the respectable farmer Robert Martin, and sets about attaching her to the young vicar, Mr. Elton. The plan collapses when Elton, tipsy after a Christmas party, proposes to Emma herself in a carriage; he soon brings home a rich, vulgar bride, Augusta Hawkins of Bristol. Two newcomers complicate the second volume. Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston's charming son, raised by wealthy relations at Enscombe, flirts with Emma, while Jane Fairfax, the accomplished orphan niece of the talkative, impoverished Miss Bates, returns to Highbury pale and reserved. Emma half-invents a scandal about Jane and a Mr. Dixon; a piano arrives for Jane with no giver named; and Mr. Knightley, the Woodhouses' neighbour and old friend at Donwell Abbey and the brother of Emma's sister's husband, watches with growing unease. At the ball at the Crown he rescues Harriet when Elton snubs her, and Harriet's affections shift where Emma does not look. The crisis comes on an outing to Box Hill, where Emma, in high spirits, jokes cruelly at Miss Bates's expense. Mr. Knightley rebukes her privately, and she weeps, repents and visits the Bateses the next morning. Mrs. Churchill's sudden death then frees Frank to reveal that he and Jane have been secretly engaged since Weymouth, so that his flirtation with Emma was a screen. Harriet next confesses that she hopes for Mr. Knightley, and Emma realizes in a moment that she loves him herself. He proposes in the shrubbery at Hartfield; Harriet, her parentage found to be a tradesman's, gladly marries Robert Martin; and Mr. Knightley agrees to live at Hartfield so as not to part Emma from her father. The novel was written in 1814-15 and published by John Murray in December 1815 (the title page reads 1816), in three volumes, with a dedication to the Prince Regent.

Plot or Argument

• Volume I: the matchmaker begins (Chapters I-VIII)

  Miss Taylor's marriage to Mr. Weston leaves Emma lonely; she befriends Harriet Smith, paints her portrait, and persuades her to refuse Robert Martin's letter of proposal, to Mr. Knightley's anger.

• Volume I: the Elton scheme (Chapters IX-XVIII)

  Emma reads Mr. Elton's charade as courtship of Harriet; on the way home from the Westons' Christmas party he proposes to Emma instead, is refused, and leaves for Bath while Emma breaks the news to Harriet.

• Volume II: Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill (Chapters I-XIII)

  Jane returns to her aunt and grandmother, Frank at last visits his father, Emma suspects Jane of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, and a pianoforte arrives for Jane from an unnamed donor.

• Volume II: Mrs. Elton arrives (Chapters XIV-XVIII)

  Elton returns with a bride who patronizes Jane and calls Mr. Knightley by his surname; plans for a ball at the Crown are made and postponed when Frank is called back to Enscombe.

• Volume III: the ball and the gipsies (Chapters I-VI)

  At the ball Mr. Knightley dances with Harriet after Elton's snub; Frank rescues Harriet from a band of gipsies; the party at Donwell gathers strawberries and Jane walks home alone in distress.

• Volume III: Box Hill (Chapters VII-IX)

  Emma's joke about Miss Bates's dull speeches draws Mr. Knightley's rebuke; she repents and calls on the Bateses; news comes of Mrs. Churchill's death at Richmond.

• Volume III: disclosures (Chapters X-XIII)

  The secret engagement of Frank and Jane is revealed; Harriet confesses her hopes of Mr. Knightley; Emma recognizes her own love, and Mr. Knightley proposes in the garden at Hartfield.

• Volume III: settlements (Chapters XIV-XIX)

  Frank writes his long letter of explanation, Harriet accepts Robert Martin after all, the question of Mr. Woodhouse is solved by Mr. Knightley's moving to Hartfield, and the wedding takes place with little white satin.

Characters

• Emma Woodhouse, protagonist

  Clever, wealthy young mistress of Hartfield whose confidence in her own judgment leads her into a series of misreadings.

• Mr. George Knightley, neighbour and suitor

  Owner of Donwell Abbey, about thirty-seven or thirty-eight, the one person who tells Emma when she is wrong.

• Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father

  Kindly, anxious invalid who dislikes change, fears draughts and rich food, and trusts the apothecary Mr. Perry above all men.

• Harriet Smith, Emma's protégée

  Sweet-tempered parlour boarder of unknown birth whose affections Emma tries to direct.

• Robert Martin, suitor

  Sensible young tenant farmer of Abbey-Mill Farm whose proposal to Harriet Emma discourages.

• Mr. Elton, vicar of Highbury

  Agreeable young clergyman who courts Emma's fortune rather than Harriet.

• Mrs. Elton (Augusta Hawkins), comic antagonist

  Elton's self-important bride from Bristol, forever mentioning her brother-in-law's seat at Maple Grove.

• Frank Churchill, charmer

  Mr. Weston's son, adopted by his rich aunt and uncle, secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax.

• Jane Fairfax, foil to Emma

  Elegant, reserved orphan facing a governess's life, Emma's equal in accomplishment and her rival in Highbury's regard.

• Miss Bates, village spinster

  Talkative, grateful, poor daughter of the late vicar, whom Emma insults at Box Hill.

• Mr. and Mrs. Weston, friends

  Emma's former governess and her good-natured husband, of Randalls.

• Mr. Perry, apothecary

  Highbury's medical man, never seen speaking in his own voice but quoted constantly by Mr. Woodhouse.

Lessons

• The imagination that arranges others

  Emma's errors come from a lively mind with too little to do: she reads Mr. Elton's charade, Jane's piano and Harriet's blushes according to stories she has already written. Austen shows that intelligence without humility misreads people, and that the cure is attention to what others actually say and do.

  • Why does Emma misread Mr. Elton so completely in Volume I?
  • What evidence about Frank and Jane does Emma overlook, and why?
  • Is Emma's matchmaking ever generous, or always self-pleasing?

• Faithful are the wounds of a friend

  After Box Hill Mr. Knightley tells Emma that her joke at Miss Bates was unkind because Miss Bates is poor, aging and dependent on her neighbours' regard. Emma accepts the rebuke, weeps, and visits the Bateses the next day. The novel treats honest correction as a form of love and repentance as something done, not only felt.

  • Why does Mr. Knightley stress Miss Bates's poverty and her long acquaintance with Emma?
  • How does Emma show that her repentance is real?
  • Why is Mr. Knightley willing to risk Emma's displeasure?

• Rank and worth in a small society

  Highbury is finely graded, from Hartfield and Donwell down to the Bateses' rooms and the Martins' farm. Emma at first despises Robert Martin as beneath Harriet, while Mr. Knightley values his good sense. Austen does not overturn the order of her village, but she judges each person by conduct within it, so that the farmer proves more worthy than the vicar.

  • What do Emma and Mr. Knightley each think of Robert Martin, and who is proved right?
  • How does Mrs. Elton's way of treating Jane Fairfax compare with Emma's?

• Self-knowledge arrives all at once

  When Harriet names Mr. Knightley, Emma suddenly understands her own heart and her past conduct together. Austen presents self-knowledge as a moment of painful clarity that has been prepared by many small corrections. Emma's long night of reflection in Volume III, Chapter XI, is a model of examining one's conscience.

  • What does Emma learn about herself in the hour after Harriet's confession?
  • Why does Austen let Emma discover her love through jealousy?
  • Does Emma change by the end, or only become better informed?

Context

Emma is set in a single Surrey village in the years of the Napoleonic Wars, though the war is barely mentioned. Highbury's world of gentry houses, a vicarage, a farm, a school, an inn and Ford's shop shows the gradations of English provincial rank that Austen knew from Hampshire and Kent. It is the only Austen novel named for its heroine, and its heroine, unlike the others, needs neither money nor a husband.

Composition

Austen began Emma at Chawton in January 1814 and finished it in March 1815. John Murray published it in three volumes in December 1815, with 1816 on the title page. At the suggestion of the Prince Regent's librarian, James Stanier Clarke, who had shown her Carlton House, Austen dedicated it to the Prince Regent. Her nephew's 1870 memoir reports that she expected a heroine whom no one but herself would much like.

Reception

Walter Scott reviewed Emma at length in the Quarterly Review (dated October 1815, issued in 1816), praising Austen's faithful copying of ordinary life. Austen collected friends' opinions of the book in a manuscript of reactions. Later critics have admired its free indirect narration, which lets readers share Emma's mistakes, and its intricate plot of clues planted for Frank and Jane's secret. It has been adapted many times for film and television.

Comparisons

• pride-and-prejudice

  Elizabeth Bennet and Emma both misjudge through confidence in their own perception, but Elizabeth's prejudice is formed by a wounding first impression while Emma's errors come from idle invention; each is corrected by the man she will marry.

• mansfield-park

  Written immediately before Emma, Mansfield Park has a quiet, self-doubting heroine in Fanny Price; Emma reverses her in a mistress of the house who is almost never in doubt.

• persuasion

  Anne Elliot, the heroine of Austen's next novel, once yielded to bad advice about a match; Harriet Smith is the one who yields to Emma, so the two books look at persuasion from opposite sides.

• sense-and-sensibility

  Both novels turn on a secret engagement (Edward and Lucy, Frank and Jane) whose concealment misleads the heroine and pains a reserved young woman.

• love-and-freindship

  Austen's teenage burlesque mocks heroines who live by novels; Emma, twenty-five years later, is a heroine who lives by her own invented plots, and Harriet's sentimental keepsakes recall the juvenilia's comedy.

• middlemarch

  Eliot's provincial town extends Austen's village into a web of professions, politics and money; Dorothea Brooke, like Emma, is a well-off young woman whose ardent misjudgment of others shapes her story.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Mr. Elton's charade in Vol. I, Ch. IX, and how Emma and Harriet each decide whom it is meant for.
• Every mention of the pianoforte sent to Jane Fairfax, and who seems to know most about it.
• Mr. Knightley's choice to dance with Harriet at the Crown after Mr. Elton refuses her.
• Emma's joke at Box Hill, the carriage ride home, and her visit to Miss Bates the following morning.
• The long hour of reflection after Harriet's confession in Vol. III, Ch. XI.

Key terms and names

Highbury

The large Surrey village, sixteen miles from London, where nearly the whole novel takes place.

Hartfield

The Woodhouses' house and grounds, the social centre of Highbury, which Mr. Knightley agrees to share at the end.

Donwell Abbey

Mr. Knightley's estate, with the strawberry beds and the view of Abbey-Mill Farm seen during the Donwell party.

Parlour boarder

A pupil who lived with the schoolmistress's family; Harriet's position at Mrs. Goddard's, which leaves her rank uncertain.

Apothecary

A medical practitioner who advised and supplied medicines; Mr. Perry, whose opinions Mr. Woodhouse quotes constantly.

Charade

A riddle in verse; Mr. Elton's charade on courtship is the first piece of evidence Emma misreads.

Governess

The employment Jane Fairfax expects to take, which she likens, in an exchange with Mrs. Elton, to offices for the sale not of flesh but of intellect.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Emma persuade Harriet to refuse Robert Martin, and what does Mr. Knightley say about it?
2. Comprehension What happens in the carriage after the Westons' Christmas party?
3. Comprehension What does Frank Churchill's secret engagement explain about his behaviour toward Emma and Jane?
4. Interpretation Why is Emma's joke at Box Hill worse than her earlier mistakes, according to Mr. Knightley?
5. Interpretation How is Jane Fairfax a mirror for Emma, and why does Emma find her hard to like?
6. Interpretation How does Austen let the reader share Emma's errors while also seeing past them?
7. Big Question Is it ever right to try to arrange another person's happiness?
8. Big Question What does a true friend owe a friend who is doing wrong?

Faith Connections

• Proverbs 27:6 (Scripture)

  Faithful are the wounds of a friend: Mr. Knightley's rebuke after Box Hill wounds Emma because he loves her, and she comes to value it above flattery.

• Matthew 7:3-5 (Scripture)

  Emma sees every mote in Harriet's, Jane's and Mr. Elton's affairs while missing the beam of her own vanity and her own heart.

• Romans 12:16 (Scripture)

  Paul's counsel to condescend to men of low estate and not be wise in one's own conceits fits both Emma's slighting of Miss Bates and her overconfidence.

• C. S. Lewis, A Note on Jane Austen (1954) (Great Conversation)

  Lewis argued that several Austen heroines, Emma among them, undergo an undeceiving in which they see their past conduct truly and are humbled, a pattern he related to Austen's moral seriousness.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A person who trusts her own cleverness will misread others; correction from a faithful friend, accepted with humility, brings self-knowledge; therefore Emma's happiness depends less on her gifts than on her willingness to be told she is wrong.

Rhetorical device: free indirect discourse. In Vol. III, Ch. XI, the narration moves into Emma's own thoughts so that the arrow-like realization that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself reads as her discovery and the narrator's at once.

Debate: Resolved: that Emma was more to blame for Harriet's unhappiness than Mr. Elton was.

Memory Work

She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed!

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace Emma's three great misreadings (Mr. Elton, Frank Churchill and Jane, Harriet's attachment) and argue which one teaches her most.

Comparison with Pride and Prejudice: Compare Mr. Knightley's rebuke at Box Hill with Darcy's letter after the Hunsford proposal: how does each man correct the heroine, and how does each heroine respond?

Medical Lens

Mr. Woodhouse is one of English fiction's best-known comic valetudinarians: he dreads damp, draughts, late hours, wedding cake and rich food, recommends thin gruel to his guests, and quotes the apothecary Mr. Perry on every subject. Perry represents the Regency apothecary, a general practitioner who visited, advised and supplied medicines, below the physicians in professional rank. The Woodhouse family's anxieties are shared by Emma's sister Isabella, who argues with her father over the rival merits of seaside resorts and medical men. Austen treats these worries with affectionate comedy, but the book also contains real illness. Harriet's inflamed throat sets Mr. Elton fearing a putrid infectious kind, Jane Fairfax declines in health under the strain of her secret engagement, and Mrs. Churchill, whose nervous complaints Highbury has dismissed as selfish fancy, dies suddenly, which the narrator notes clears her of the charge of imagined illness. Readers have sometimes described Mr. Woodhouse in modern terms of health anxiety; any such label is a reading of a comic character, not a diagnosis.

• Vol. I, Ch. I-III

  Mr. Woodhouse's dislike of change and marriage, his gruel and fears about wedding cake, and his reliance on Mr. Perry are introduced at Hartfield's evening parties.

  Hypochondria Physicians Doctors Aging Senescence
• Vol. I, Ch. XII-XIII

  Isabella and her father compare their medical men, Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Perry, and the merits of South End and Cromer for sea-bathing; Harriet's feverish sore throat makes Mr. Elton fear a putrid infection.

  Hypochondria Fever Infection Physicians Doctors
• Vol. III, Ch. IX

  Mrs. Churchill dies suddenly at Richmond; the narrator observes that her death justified her long complaints, and Jane Fairfax's illness worsens.

  Death Dying Neurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Draw a map of Highbury placing Hartfield, Donwell Abbey, Randalls, the vicarage, Abbey-Mill Farm, the Bateses' rooms and Ford's shop, and rank the households by wealth and by worth.

• Fiction

  Retell the Box Hill outing from Miss Bates's point of view, ending with Emma's visit the next morning.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation in which Harriet tells Robert Martin, a year later, why she refused him the first time.

• Essay

  Collect every clue Austen gives about Frank and Jane's engagement before Vol. III, Ch. X, and explain how the narration hides them in plain sight.

Further Reading

• A Memoir of Jane Austen, James Edward Austen-Leigh

  The 1870 family memoir by Austen's nephew.

• Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin

• Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler

• The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth

  Includes a well-known discussion of how Austen controls sympathy for Emma.

• Persuasion, Jane Austen