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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.