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First published 1815
Published in Penguin Classics 1996
Reissued with new Chronology, updated Further Reading and revised Notes 2003
Reissued with an updated Further Reading 2015
Introduction, Further Reading and Notes copyright © Fiona Stafford, 1996, 2003, 2015
The Novels of Jane Austen and Chronology copyright © Claire Lamont, 1995, 2003
View of the North Façade, Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire by Algernon Cecil Newton, 1940 © National Trust
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-92002-3
Introduction
Chronology
Further Reading
The Novels of Jane Austen
Emma
Notes
Note on the Text
Emendations to the Text
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TO
HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
THE PRINCE REGENT,
THIS WORK IS,
BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S PERMISSION,
MOST RESPECTFULLY
DEDICATED,
BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S
DUTIFUL
AND OBEDIENT
HUMBLE SERVANT,
THE AUTHOR.1
The texts of Austen’s novels in the Penguin Edition are based on the first editions and have been edited afresh. The texts of four of the novels are necessarily based on the first edition: in the case of Pride and Prejudice Austen sold the copyright to the publisher of the first edition and was not involved with the preparation of the two further editions in her life-time; Emma did not reach a second edition in Britain in Austen’s lifetime; and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, however, both appeared in second editions in which Austen took some part. Hitherto all reprints of these novels have been based on the second editions. The Penguin Edition returns to the first-edition texts of both novels, and includes a list of the substantive variants between the two editions so that readers can see clearly for the first time the alterations made between the first and second editions.
The editors have worked from copies of the first editions kindly supplied by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The editorial policy is one of minimum intervention: no attempt has been made to modernize spelling or punctuation, or to render spellings consistent so long as the variant spellings were acceptable in the period. Where any of these might cause difficulty to the modern reader the editor has offered help and explanation in a note.
The editors have emended the text in the following circumstances: errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected. Where, after all allowance has been made for historical usage, the text seems faulty the editors have cautiously emended it. They have been assisted by the fact that there is a tradition of Austen scholarship. The first edition of Austen’s novels to examine the texts thoroughly was The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 5 vols (Clarendon, 1923). This pioneering edition was itself revised in later reprints, and all recent editions have been either based on Chapman’s text or acknowledge debts to it. The editors of the Penguin Edition have edited Austen’s texts anew from the first editions, but in making decisions about obscurities and cruxes they have borne in mind the work of previous commentators on the Austen texts. The greatest of these is R. W. Chapman, but there have been others, including critics and general readers who have from time to time queried passages in Austen’s texts and suggested emendations. Where the Penguin editors are indebted to a previous scholar for a particular emendation they acknowledge it, and where a crux has provoked controversy they indicate it in a brief note. All corrections to the text other than any which are purely typographical are recorded in the ‘Emendations to the Text’.
Austen’s novels originally appeared in three volumes (with the exception of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which appeared together in four volumes). To make the original volume arrangements visible in a one-volume format the Penguin Edition has headlines at the top of each page so that in any opening the headline on the left will give the volume and chapter number in the first edition and the headline on the right will give the chapter number in a continuously numbered sequence.
The bibliographical basis of the Penguin Edition is David Gilson’s Bibliography of Jane Austen (Clarendon, 1982), to which the edition is happy to acknowledge its debt.
Claire Lamont
New readers are advised that this
Introduction makes details of the plot explicit.
From its first appearance, late in December 1815, Emma has been criticized for its lack of action while being eulogized for its accurate depiction of everyday life.1 Walter Scott, one of the earliest reviewers, found the book to have ‘even less story’ than Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, but nevertheless admired the author’s ‘knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize’.2 Almost two centuries later, similar attitudes are to be found among those general readers who continue to delight in Austen’s ability to create lifelike characters and situations, and among critics of a historical bent, who turn to her novels for information on how people lived in the early nineteenth century. Emma has fed such books as Peggy Hickman’s A Jane Austen Household Book, where Mr Woodhouse’s pride in Hartfield pork occasions the publication of a series of Regency meat dishes, as well as more academic studies such as Oliver MacDonagh’s Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, where Highbury is taken as a model for the ‘social organization and habits’ of ‘the small towns and villages of south-eastern England during the Napoleonic wars’.3
Approaches of this kind reveal a persistent desire on the part of Emma’s readers to ground the novel in the ‘real world’, which in turn leads to careful study of any detail that might fix it in a specific time and place. It is not enough that the novel is roughly contemporary with its composition (between 21 January 1814 and 29 March 1815); internal references to such recognizable events as the Union between Britain and Ireland, the abolition of the slave trade or the publication of Moore’s Irish Melodies, have sent scholars scurrying from 1800 to 1808 to 1813, with out necessarily shedding very much light on Emma itself.4 The geography of Surrey, too, has tantalized generations of readers eager to follow in the footsteps of Mr Elton or Jane Fairfax, to explore Box Hill, or visit The Crown. It is as if sorting out the exact location and plan of Highbury will somehow explain the novel, even though Austen’s most distinguished editor, R. W. Chapman, admitted years ago that ‘the indications are just not sufficient’ to construct a map.5
Paradoxically, it is the very evasiveness of Emma that has prompted these determined efforts to establish the authenticity of thisportrayalof early nineteenth-century Surrey. In the later part of the twentieth century an alternative tradition has developed among readers interested not in the realistic detail of the text, but in its riddles, anagrams and puns.6 Although there are those who still regard Austen’s work as a window on the past, many critics are now willing to celebrate the irresolution of the text, regarding the words of the narrator (and even Mr Knightley) not as indicators of authorial intention, but as part of a series of competing discourses and linguistic puzzles.
If readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Austen as a proponent of nineteenth-century moral values, recent critics have suggested that her work is ‘subversive’ since, as Joseph Litvak has commented, Emma is a ‘potentially endless circuit of fiction, interpretation and desire’.7 In response, perhaps, to the long-standing critical emphasis on realism, the 1980s saw a tendency to make Emma independent of place, period and even author, an autonomous text to be treated on its own terms irrespective of contemporary context or the ever-inaccessible views of Jane Austen.8
The difficulty is, of course, that both approaches find rewards in Emma, which continually teases the reader with realistic clues and self-reflexive ironies. A key location such as Box Hill, for example, presents no problems for those keen to read the novel as social history. Anne-Marie Edwards has observed that Austen visited her relatives, the Cookes, at Great Bookham Rectory in June 1814, and sees the experience contributing directly to the work at hand:
She had begun writing Emma early in January of the same year. Perhaps it was during this stay that she decided to set one of the most important scenes in the novel, the disastrous picnic when Emma is most unkind to Miss Bates, on nearby Box Hill. This well-known beauty spot was a great attraction then as now and Jane must have joined an ‘exploring party’ (to quote Mrs Elton) to admire its tree-shaded cliffs and stand, as does her Emma, on the open hillside above Dorking in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.9
The fact that Box Hill is a ‘real’ place, and one known to Jane Austen, however, does not mean that its inclusion is merely an authenticating device, even though it may help to maintain the reader’s belief in the narrative. Emma contains non-fictional and imaginary place names, but the former may be retained as much for some accidental metaphorical significance as for any special biographical reason (Richmond is certainly an appropriate home for Mrs Churchill, while Kingston makes a suitable port of call for those patriotic Englishmen, Robert Martin and George Knightley). Box Hill is itself rich in possibilities, since its name encompasses not only the verbal sparring and considerable damage sustained there by Austen’s characters, but also the sense of claustrophobia – of being boxed in – that is so brilliantly evoked, as the same set of people embark on yet another frivolous excursion. Whether there are further implicit references, for example to the box-tree scene in Twelfth Night (which also extracts rather painful comedy from a situation fraught with in-jokes at the expense of others present), is open to question, but once alert to the persistent mischievous wordplay, anything seems possible, if only momentarily.10
Nor is it the place names alone that seem to blur the real and the metaphorical. Weston, for example, is the name of an old Surrey family and is mentioned in Thomas Fuller’s The Worthies of England, of 1662, while the name Randalls belonged to a house near Leatherhead.11 Knightley, too, may be derived from local history, since a Robert Knightly became Sheriff of Surrey in 1676, while the pulpit of the Leatherhead church was restored by a Mr Knightley in 1761.12 These facts do not, however, diminish the imaginative potential of the names and many readers have attempted to decipher their apparent allegorical meanings.
George Knightley, especially, seems to combine ideas of a chivalric past with the reassuring stability of agriculture, making it a perfect name for the perfect English gentleman. Before assuming too readily that Austen must therefore be promoting a safe, feudal ideal, however, it is worth considering the name’s contemporary associations: ‘Farmer’ George III had been declared insane in 1810, while the lifestyle of his successor, the flamboyant Prince Regent (to whom Emma is dedicated), was hardly stable or conservative.13 The characters of Austen’s own ‘knights’ – Sir Thomas Bertram and Sir Walter Elliot – are also seriously flawed and in both Mansfield Park and Persuasion the baronets contrast unfavourably with the naval officers, whose titles derive from personal merit.14 Even in Emma, with its apparent disdain for the upwardly mobile Mrs Elton, there are hints that Knightley’s influence, though thoroughly English, has less positive aspects. The gypsies’ choice of encampment on the road, for example, which is so alarming to Harriet Smith, may reflect a loss of common land as a result of the continuing enclosures that are suggested by Knightley’s discussions of moving footpaths and rotating crops.15 His charitable gestures, too, though admirable in many ways, are nevertheless dependent on the poverty that is quietly emphasized throughout the book. Even the traditional happy ending, where the heroine is united with her ‘knightley’ suitor, facilitates the absorption of the independent land at Hartfield into the patrimonial acres of the Donwell estate.
The completion of Emma in the year of Waterloo has encouraged the discernment of political meanings in the novel, and again the names have seemed significant to many readers. The obvious association between George Knightley and Englishness (apparently endorsed by the eulogy on Donwell Abbey: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort’) has led to the opposing equation of Frank Churchill with France, especially in the light of Knightley’s judgement: ‘No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very “aimable”, have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people …’16 Given recent events across the Channel, and the importance of class and inheritance in the novel, it is possible to read political allusions into Frank Churchill’s ‘indifference to a confusion of rank’ or his light-hearted desire to become a ‘true citizen of Highbury’. But although ‘Frank’ may have fairly clear associations with France, there is no obvious explanation for either Churchill or his paternal name, Weston. Equally plausible is the possibility that his name is as ironic as ‘George’, since frankness is not one of the more striking aspects of his character.
The names of the principal characters may represent some buried scheme of political, moral, or social significance, which would indicate that the entire text is an elaborate riddle, capable eventually of solution. But if Austen’s names seem to encourage the pursuit of hidden meanings and codes, they also hint that such readings are as absurd as the behaviour that is gently being ridiculed in the novel itself. Margaret Kirkham’s discovery that some of the principal names in Emma (Knightley, Cole, Campbell, Perry) are to be found in the social columns of the Bath Journal, 1801–2, suggests the possibility of accident rather than design, while the knowledge that the same Christian names occur in several different novels, and often appear to have been drawn from her immediate family, makes any consistent allegorizing seem decidedly doubtful.17 And when faced with the anagrammatical excesses of a reader such as Grant Holly, who argues that Emma signifies ‘Am me’, that wood and house are symbols of female sexuality, and that Knightley is both the ‘chivalric knight, and the nightly visitor Emma would house’, it is difficult not to feel as sceptical as intrigued.18
One of the problems about acknowledging the puns in Emma is that there is something distinctly embarrassing about the entire procedure – just as spelling out a joke becomes embarrassing, as the humour evaporates in the explanation. It is simply too heavy-handed to point out that by the end of the novel, both Emma and Knightley have ‘Donwell’. Austen’s narration is characterized by its lightness and speed, so to start labouring over the connotations of a particular word makes the reader seem dull, even in the fleeting moment of self-congratulation that marks the recognition of a pun. To engage in puzzling over the meanings of Knightley or Woodhouse is uncomfortably reminiscent of Harriet Smith struggling with Mr Elton’s charade (‘Can it be Neptune?
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
Or a trident? or a mermaid? or a shark?’), while Emma/Emma remains aloof (‘My dear Harriet, what are you thinking of?’).
The wordplay in Emma is essentially understated, and there is no attempt to show off the cleverness of the text. Unlike Mr Weston’s atrocious compliment to Emma, which is overstated in its praise for both the object and the author (‘What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection?… I will tell you. – M and A – Em-ma – Do you understand?’), the text never pauses to ensure that the reader has grasped the point.19 When Emma is gazing on the gloomy ‘prospect’ of a lonely winter at Hartfield, for example, she picks up the pictorial metaphor of the preceding sentence, which in turn evokes the opening of the novel and Knightley’s first appearance:
The picture which she had then drawn of the privations of the approaching winter, had proved erroneous; no friends had deserted them, no pleasures had been lost. – But her present forebodings she feared would experience no similar contradiction. The prospect before her now, was threatening to a degree that could not be entirely dispelled.
The significance of ‘prospect’, which plays on the various ideas of anticipation, aspiration, observation and artistic creation that have run throughout the text, is merely left for the reader to notice or not; there is no ‘prospect – prospect, do you understand?’ Indeed, many of the double meanings are accessible only on second reading as when Frank Churchill, who has asked Emma to dance, excuses himself from the obligation to Mrs Elton with the words, ‘I am an engaged man.’ Later, the same wordplay becomes darker as Miss Bates describes Jane Fairfax’s future employment as a governess, recalling with some bewilderment her niece’s earlier refusal ‘to enter into any engagement at present’.
Although Austen claimed not to write ‘for such dull Elves,/ As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves’, however, the pleasure of her text is by no means dependent on recognizing the puns and allusions.20 While some readers might enjoy the riddles and wordgames, others will be more interested in the comedy of manners, the psychological insights, or the satisfactions of the romantic plot. One of the great preoccupations of Emma is the subjectivity of perception and the way in which judgements depend on the personality and prejudices of the judge. It is thus a brave reader who ignores the persistent depiction of characters misreading situations, conversations, and even themselves, in order to arrive at a ‘correct’ interpretation of the novel.
Many scenes appear to work on more than one level, but if the reader is often flattered into assuming a position of superiority to the protagonists, there are constant hints at the limited nature of all aesthetic response. The episode in Chapter 6, for example, where Emma produces a portrait of Harriet to the admiring murmurs of Mr Elton, appears to be little more than situation comedy, based on the witty representation of the three characters’ misunderstandings of each other. Here, if anywhere, the reader seems to be treated to the accurate depiction of life so prized by Walter Scott and his successors; there even appears to be authorial endorsement of the importance of realism in art, in the narrator’s comment, ‘A likeness pleases every body.’ When taken in context, however, this apparent apology for mimesis reads very differently, as Emma’s two warmest admirers gaze at her portfolio: ‘They were both in extasies. A likeness pleases every body; and Miss Woodhouse’s performances must be capital.’ A statement that might seem intended to represent a universal truth is thus unsettled by its uncertain surroundings, and rather than indicating narratorial intrusion, might equally suggest the voice of Mr Elton posing as aesthetic expert, or of Miss Smith extending her own enthusiasm for Emma to that of the world.
The slipperiness of the phrase becomes more obvious a few paragraphs later, when it is echoed and ironized in the response of those who gather to view Emma’s portrait of Harriet: ‘Every body who saw it was pleased, but Mr Elton was in continual raptures, and defended it through every criticism.’ ‘Every body’, at this point, refers of course to the Hartfield circle – Mrs Weston, Mr Woodhouse and Mr Knightley – and it quickly becomes clear that their pleasure in the likeness has little to do with the accuracy of Emma’s representation of Harriet. For while Mrs Weston admires Emma’s ‘improvement’ to Harriet’s eyebrows and lashes, Mr Woodhouse is torn between his uncritical delight in anything his daughter might do, and his concern for Miss Smith having been placed out of doors in nothing more substantial than ‘a little shawl’. Only Mr Knightley dares find fault with the drawing, but his brusque ‘You have made her too tall, Emma’, is immediately dismissed by Mr Elton’s repeated ‘I never saw such a likeness’. In a matter of lines, the central characters reveal themselves through their responses to the portrait, which are clearly influenced by their own preconceptions, their views of the artist and their relationships with each other. Any reader, therefore, who feels confident in his or her recognition of mimetic power, might pause over Mr Elton’s enthusiastic ‘I never saw such a likeness’, while those determined to find indeterminacy consider the centrality of the artist in the scene. The appreciation of Emma, here, can perhaps be seen as an elaborate metaphor for the appreciation of Emma.
A scene that initially appears to be promoting realism in both its content and style (‘a likeness pleases every body’), thus unfolds to suggest that the perception of ‘likeness’ depends as much on the observer as the creator. If the reader finds the scene convincing or ‘realistic’, it is probably because of a previously formed view of the novel and its author. The dialogue seems lifelike, not merely because it might remind the reader of personal acquaintances, but because it continues the illusion that has been created in earlier chapters. Mr Woodhouse’s attitude is entirely consistent with the representation of his character in the opening pages – doting, anxious, and firmly resistant to the thought of stirring from his own fire-place. Mrs Weston’s response, too, reflects the opinion she expressed to Mr Knightley in Chapter 5, that Emma’s somewhat high-handed attentions to Harriet can be nothing but beneficial to the girl of humble origins. The same conversation is recalled in Mr Knightley’s ‘You have made her too tall’, which echoes his disapproval of Harriet being elevated above her natural station. The reader’s pleasure in the ‘likeness’ of the scene, then, is not merely a question of it ‘ringing true’, but of recognizing the consistency between the representation here and that of earlier passages.
Despite the completeness of the text, however, much interest can be derived from reading it in relation to its historical context. Emma’s artistic accomplishments, for example, like many of the novel’s details, can be seen in the light of contemporary debates on female education following works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792.21 Mr Elton’s activities, too, may be read as a comment on the role of the early nineteenth-century clergyman, a topic which had already been explored in Austen’s previous novel, Mansfield Park.22 Even the individual remarks in the scene may be illuminated by knowledge of the period: Mrs Weston’s concern with Harriet’s eyes, for example, being characteristic of contemporary notions of female beauty, while Mr Woodhouse’s suspicion of Harriet’s skimpy attire may well be connected with the shawl being a relatively new, and foreign, addition to fashionable English wardrobes.23 And, comically submerged in the opposing views of Mr Knightley and Mrs Weston, is the central question of whether art should represent nature exactly, or whether the artist should aim to improve its object in accordance with an ideal beauty – an issue that had vexed aestheticians throughout the eighteenth century.24
Austen’s assessment of her own creative endeavours in comparison to those of her nephew, James Edward Austen, has often fuelled the assumption that she aimed at the realistic portrayal of a small, familiar part of contemporary life:
What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?25
The ‘bit of Ivory’ refers to the popular contemporary art of the miniature, which has seemed to many readers an appropriate parallel for Austen’s meticulous re-creations of upper middle-class society.26 It is worth considering the inherent ironies of her remark, however, not only with regard to the self-deprecatory comparison with her nephew, but also in that her most recently published novel, Emma, had run to some thousand pages in its original, three-volume format.
If Austen’s technique has something in common with that of the miniaturist, however, her work also has analogies with a host of other artistic kinds. Just as Miss Woodhouse displays ‘Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours’, so Emma exhibits an extraordinary diversity of styles and voices, often switching from one to another in a single paragraph. Like the portfolio, it is a book full of ‘beginnings’, the imaginative effects often sparking from the contrasts in the prose rather than any sustained narrative position. The implicit parallels with visual art are frequently suggested, through pictorial imagery, specialist language or the arrangement of scenes reminiscent of contemporary paintings:
The appearance of the little sitting-room as they entered, was tranquillity itself; Mrs Bates, deprived of her usual employment, slumbering on one side of the fire, Frank Churchill, at a table near her, most deedily occupied about her spectacles, and Jane Fairfax, standing with her back to them, intent on her pianoforté.
Emma’s carefully composed scenes, evocative of the domestic interiors of the contemporary painter, David Wilkie, frequently occupy no more than a sentence but, as Frank Churchill observes, ‘Miss Woodhouse, you have the art of giving pictures in a few words.’
The novel’s portraiture, too, is similarly succinct, Harriet Smith being described as ‘short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness’, in direct contrast to Jane Fairfax, with her ‘dark eye-lashes and eye-brows’ whose beauty is ‘not regular, but … very pleasing’.
Often, the visual set-pieces are created specifically for comic disruption, as when Harriet’s encounter with the gypsies is introduced in the language of the late-eighteenth-century picturesque:
About half a mile beyond Highbury, making a sudden turn, and deeply shaded by elms on each side, it became for a considerable stretch very retired; and when the young ladies had advanced some way into it, they had suddenly perceived at a small distance before them, on a broader patch of greensward by the side, a party of gipsies. A child on the watch came towards them to beg.
The sentimental landscape is, however, disrupted by the more Rowlandsonian reaction of Harriet’s companion:
Miss Bickerton, excessively frightened, gave a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury.
Even as the aesthetic advantages of the picturesque are exploited, its falseness is mocked, as a more comic perception of human behaviour intrudes on the ideals of contemporary art.
The fluidity of the novel can embrace, within a paragraph, opposing images and attitudes, deriving comic power from surprise and incongruity.27 If Northanger Abbey had played explicitly with literary convention and parody, Emma similarly, but more subtly, jokes about the nature of art through the introduction and immediate deflation of a particular style. The disruption of the picturesque in this passage may suggest the advocacy of a less idealized view of life, but ironically, the apparent emphasis on comic realism is dependent on the reader appreciating both the convention that is being upset and the alternative with which it is juxtaposed.
The evocations of different artistic styles work in much the same way as the puns – teasing the reader with suggested likenesses which are only to be undermined by contradiction and uncertainty. For no sooner has Harriet’s adventure been interpreted as comic than Emma’s very different reading is presented, which sees the episode not as picturesque or burlesque, but as romantic. For Emma, the gypsies are no more than a device to bring together the hero and heroine – ‘a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way’ – for the self-styled ‘imaginist’ the possibilities are irresistible. And yet, as Emma re-creates the incident for others, it is transformed into yet another literary kind:
In her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.
The rapid generic shifting is also mirrored in the prose itself, which similarly startles the reader through its protean refusal to maintain a consistent voice or tone. If the visual scenes are disrupted by the sudden introduction of an unexpected element, so the third person narrative is persistently broken by free indirect style, dialogue, quotations and letters. At times dialogue becomes dramatic monologue, the speeches (especially those of Mrs Elton or Miss Bates) running on for more than a page of breathless hyphenated excitement. In other scenes, the more staccato exchanges seem closer to drama, especially in the first edition where the page layout allows only eight words to a line.28 There are even stage directions:
‘Well, Miss Woodhouse, (with a gentle sigh,) what do you think of her? – Is not she very charming?’
There was a little hesitation in Emma’s answer.
‘Oh! yes – very – a very pleasing young woman.’
‘I think her beautiful, quite beautiful.’
‘Very nicely dressed, indeed; a remarkably elegant gown.’
‘I am not at all surprized that he should have fallen in love.’
‘Oh! no – there is nothing, to surprize one at all. – A pretty fortune; and she came in his way.’
Nor are the departures from the linear narrative always as clear cut as this; very often a quasi-Johnsonian aphorism will slide almost imperceptibly into interior monologue (‘Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common; and there were two points on which she was not quite easy’), while much of the apparently omniscient narration reflects the views and prejudices of the eponymous heroine. Indeed, many of the novel’s minor characters never appear at all, while those who do are not given direct speech. The reader becomes familiar with an extraordinary range of figures – William Larkins, the Miss Coxes, the Campbells and the Dixons, Mrs Hodges, Serle, the Churchills, Miss Nash, the Sucklings, Mr Wingfield, James and Hannah – without any description from the narrator.29 Even Mr Perry, who seems an almost ubiquitous presence in Highbury, lives only in the thoughts and dialogue of the major speaking characters, and when at last he appears in person, he is hardly centre-stage: ‘As they were turning into the grounds, Mr Perry passed by on horseback. The gentlemen spoke of his horse.’
Throughout the novel, the reader is both comforted with the illusion of a cosy rural community of familiar figures, and unsettled by the realization that these figures have been constructed by the individual imagination, working only with hints from other fictional characters.
The difficulty of connecting the language to a particular source is part of the persistent exploration of the nature of reading, and the gentle exposure of the reader’s limited understanding of the novel. Among the most obvious disruptions to the text (and thus the reader’s complacency) are the riddles and poems that Emma delights in collecting. Mr Elton’s charade, for example, stands out boldly from the preceding paragraphs, and continues to disrupt the pages that follow, as it is quoted and requoted by the baffled Harriet. If the reader is initially puzzled, the answer to the riddle is rapidly supplied by Emma, but this does not, in fact, solve all the questions raised by Mr Elton’s poem. The text offers no indication as to whether the poem has supposedly been composed by the vicar of Highbury, or copied from some miscellany or magazine, or concocted from contemporary verses. For although the sentiment is absurdly inflated, the technical quality is rather better than might be expected and thus invites speculation over its origin.30
Equally puzzling, albeit for different reasons, is Mr Woodhouse’s favourite, ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid’. Although this is identified by Emma as the work of David Garrick and has long been decoded to refer to the word ‘chimney-sweeper’, it is nevertheless perplexing, since the original poem plays on sexual innuendo and thus seems a surprising choice for Mr Woodhouse. Since he has himself forgotten the rest of the verse, the apparent inappropriateness of the riddle may seem a joke at his expense; but it is equally possible to see it as contributing an extra dimension to Mr Woodhouse’s otherwise somewhat caricatured personality, especially as it is associated in his mind with the memory of his dead wife.
A more clearly comic example of the introduction of sexuality through quotation can be seen in Mrs Elton’s remarkable resort to Gay’s Fables as a parallel to the Jane Fairfax/Frank Churchill romance:
For when a lady’s in the case,
You know all other things give place.
Although Mrs Elton, like Mr Woodhouse, has forgotten the source of her lines, many contemporary readers would have been aware that they are part of the misremembered speech of a ‘stateley bull’, whose business is pressing:
Love calls me hence; a fav’rite cow
Expects me near yon barley mow:
And when a lady’s in the case,
You know, all other things give place.31
Characteristically, the allusion is not spelled out in the text, but the extraordinary juxtaposition of Mrs Elton’s desperate gentility and unwitting coarseness is simply left to amuse and puzzle the reader, even as the plot ostensibly unravels. Indeed, Mrs Elton’s rather clumsy evocation of literature emphasizes, retrospectively, a number of other moments when characters have used the expression ‘in the case’ for unacknowledged romantic attachments. But it is only Mrs Elton who brings the novel’s perpetual undercurrent of sexual excitement to the surface and in doing so, disrupts the subtle flow of understatement, even as she boasts of her own ‘fine flow of spirits’.
Throughout Emma, the possibility of revealing too much is constantly suggested, while the moments of greatest embarrassment are those when a character has overstepped the line of reticence to uncover something that has been hidden. Whether it is Mr Elton declaring his passion in the carriage, or Frank Churchill composing ‘Dixon’ in a wordgame, the uncomfortable sense of rule-breaking is the same and the text is filled with episodes in which the central characters blush, colour, glow or turn red. Perhaps this is why in the concluding section of the book, where all is supposedly revealed, the narrative retreats behind the various screens of letters and dialogue, leaving the reader guessing as to the exact nature of the ‘misunderstandings’ between Jane and Frank, or the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Even at the climactic moment when Emma accepts Mr Knightley, her words are withheld, and left to the imagination: ‘What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’
In a novel that delights in flirtation and embarrassment, the reader is constantly teased into trying to find out exactly what is going on. Just as the central characters, though remarkably prone to misreading situations, seem obsessed with observing each other and establishing the truth of everyone else’s feelings and intentions, so we are drawn into the attempt to resolve individual words, scenes, quotations or actions. But since each reader notices different aspects of the book, and even interprets words subjectively, the end of the novel is really an invitation to return to the beginning and attempt once more to define its meaning.
It is not a straightforward ‘likeness’ of artistic representation and object represented that ‘pleases every body’, but the constant deflection of correspondences from one idea to another, so dazzling in its effect that it is tempting to choose one line of interpretation and ignore any contradictions. To do so, however, is to refuse to play, and although such a reaction avoids the embarrassment of getting things wrong, it also denies the endless enjoyment of Emma’s irrepressible sense of fun.
Fiona Stafford
1. The title page of the first edition reads 1816, but notices advertising its publication indicate that it appeared at the end of December, 1815.
2. W. Scott, ‘Emma’, Quarterly Review 14 (1815), 188–201.
3. P. Hickman, A Jane Austen Household Book (London, 1977); O. MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, pp. 143–4.
4. Some of the references are discussed by R. W. Chapman in the appendix to his edition of Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen (3rd edn, 5 vols.; with additional notes by Mary Lascelles, Oxford, 1966), Vol. 4, p. 498. See also P. Piggott, The Innocent Diversion, Ch. 8. Although the exact setting of the story is inconclusive, I have drawn attention to any recognizable dates in the notes.
5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
6. Though not informed by the theoretical interests of the 1980s, Alistair Duckworth made an important contribution to the subsequent discussion of Austen’s textual riddles and games in ‘Spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards: games in Jane Austen’s life and fiction’, Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. J. Halperin, pp. 279–97. For more recent discussion of the games in Austen’s fiction, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure, pp. 261–301.
7. Joseph Litvak, ‘Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text, in Emma’, PMLA 100 (1985), 763–73.
8. See, e.g., A. Rosmarin, ‘Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History’, ELH 51 (1984), 315–42. For a representative selection of recent critical essays, see D. Monaghan (ed.), Emma, New Casebook Series.
9. Anne-Marie Edwards, In the Steps of Jane Austen (2nd edn, Southampton, 1985), p. 158. F.W. Bradbrook, however, notes an important literary source for Austen’s description in William Gilpin’s Observations on the Western Parts of England, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), sect. II, pp. 11–12, in Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 65–6.
10. Twelfth Night, II, v.
11. Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Weston, Elizabeth’; the family tree of the Westons of Sutton is included in O. Manning and H. Bray’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 3 vols. (London, 1804–14), Vol. 1, p. 135. R.W. Chapman notes the name Randalls in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
12. O. Manning and H. Bray, History of Surrey, Vol. 1, p. xli; R.W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
13. ‘Farmer George’ had been the butt of English satirists since the 1780s – see V. Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens and London, 1990).
14. Two of Austen’s brothers had highly successful naval careers and the elder, Frank, was knighted as a result. See J. H. and E. C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London, 1906). Austen’s knowledge of the navy has been researched exhaustively by Brian Southam, whose Jane Austen and the Navy is essential reading for anyone interested in Austen’s work.
15. On land enclosure, see M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750– 1830 (London, 1984) and for representations of the rural poor in this period, J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1980). The long years of warfare had made the efficient production of food a matter of national importance, and social observers such as Thomas Malthus had expressed serious concerns about the problems of feeding a growing population in his popular Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
16. See, e.g., W. Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, pp. 40–41; B. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, pp. 239–56.
17. M. Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, pp. 139–40. Austen lived in Bath between 1801 and 1806. For details of her immediate family, see P. Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life.
18. G. Holly, ‘Emmagrammatology’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989), 39–51, 49–50.
19. The limitations of Mr Weston’s understanding are further demonstrated by Mark Loveridge’s discovery that the riddle appears to be an in-joke for readers of moral theory, since it derives from Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), which states that ‘that must be the Perfection of Virtue where M = A’ (M being the ‘Moment of Good’, A the Ability or Agent), ‘Francis Hutcheson and Mr Weston’s Conundrum in Emma’, Notes and Queries, ns 228 (1983), pp. 214–16.
20. 29 January, 1813, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, p. 202.
21. See also Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787); Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790).
22. For Austen’s clerical background and representations of clergymen, see I. Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London, 1994).
23. Descriptions of the heroine’s eyes are a standard feature of novels of the period, while eye portraits had come into fashion in the 1790s. Shawls became fashionable after 1802, when the shortlived Peace of Amiens enabled English travellers to visit Paris and see the craze for Indian shawls brought back by Napoleon’s army from the Middle East.
24. See, e.g., W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753); W. Gilpin, Three Essays (1792); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769– 90). The question was also addressed by a host of literary aestheticians.
25. 16 December, 1816 (Letters, p. 323).
26. Readers who have equated Austen’s art with miniature painting and therefore realism are taken to task by L. Bertelsen in ‘Jane Austen’s miniatures: painting, drawing and the novels’, MLQ 45 (1984), 350–72.
27. Compare Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the emergence of the novel as a genre, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1981).
28. On Austen’s debts to dramatic writers see M. Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art; Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 69–75; Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London, 2002). The dramatic qualities of Austen’s texts have been demonstrated in the numerous film and television adaptations; for critical discussion of some of these, see Andrew Wright, ‘Dramatizations of the Novels’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 120–30, and for more recent versions, L. Troost and S. Greenfield (eds.), Jane Austen in Hollywood.
29. See MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds.
30. Margaret Ann Doody points out that the charade appears in A New Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Transpositions, &c, 2 vols. (London, 1791), II, 15 (‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 347–63, 362).
31. From Fable L, ‘The Hare and Many Friends’, in John Gay’s Fables (London, 1727), p. 172.