Emma
Jane Austen (1815)
“A novel about a woman who is wrong about everything — and the masterpiece is that you agree with her the whole time.”
At a Glance
Emma Woodhouse — handsome, clever, and rich — decides to play matchmaker in the village of Highbury, Surrey. She steers her protégée Harriet Smith away from eligible farmer Robert Martin and toward ineligible vicar Mr. Elton, fails disastrously, and then convinces herself that Harriet and the dashing Frank Churchill are destined. Meanwhile she dismisses sensible Mr. Knightley's friendship as mere neighbourly concern and misreads every actual romantic situation around her. After the humiliating Box Hill picnic — where she insults the poor, harmless Miss Bates — Emma begins to see clearly. The novel ends with two unexpected engagements and one long-awaited one: Emma to Knightley.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published November 1815, Emma is widely considered the most technically accomplished of Austen's six novels. The sustained use of free indirect discourse — rendering a character's consciousness from within while maintaining ironic distance — influenced virtually every subsequent practitioner of the psychological novel, from Henry James through Virginia Woolf through contemporary literary fiction. Austen herself described her ambition: 'a heroine whom no one but myself will much like' — and then proved she was wrong about that, too.
Diction Profile
Regency period formality — elevated diction, complex syntax, sustained ironic distance between narrator and subject
Moderate by Victorian standards, extremely precise. Austen uses very few ornate metaphors