Emma

by Jane Austen

Ebook, 2012

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Library's review

Emma Woodhouse is one of Jane Austen's most infuriating heroines. She is rich, spoiled, and as prone to meddling in the lives of others as she is to neglecting her own self-improvement. She should be insufferable, and the fact that she is not is a credit to Austen's clear-eyed ability to create

three-dimensional characters, put them into situations where they do not shine, and then redeem them in the end.

Really, Emma's problem is that there is no one who is both her age and her social status in the small English country town where she lives with her widowed father, who is a study in self-centered spoiling himself. Even as she is doing things that make the reader want to slap her, Austen gives us insight into Emma's thoughts that show she is not wholly unaware of where her faults lie and her sincere desire to overcome them, even if she isn't quite sure how to accomplish that.

Many years ago, I read a biography of Rex Stout, who created the ineffable private detectives Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. When biographer John McAleer asked Rex in the final days of his life what Wolfe was doing at that moment, Rex said, "He's re-reading Emma ." Indeed, Stout had that famous misogynist detective declare in more than one book that Austen was his favorite writer, and Emma the perfect novel. I wouldn't call it perfect, and I'm not sure it's even my favorite Austen, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

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Description

Emma is a literary classic by Jane Austen following the genteel women of Georgian-Regency England in their most cherished sport: matchmaking. Emma is spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied. After a couple she has introduced gets married, she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities and, blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives, proceeds to forge ahead in her new interest despite objections. What follows is a comedy of manners, in which Emma repeatedly counsels her friends for or against their marriage prospects, absent any notice of their true emotions or desires. This story is often cited as a personal favorite of critics and literary historians, and Emma is set apart from other Austen heroines by her seeming immunity to romantic attraction.… (more)

Media reviews

New York TImes

The institution of marriage, like the novel itself, has changed greatly since Austen’s time; but as long as human beings long for this kind of mutual recognition and understanding, “Emma” will live.

— 3 more

Salon.com

“Perhaps the key to Emma’s perfection, however, is that it is a comic novel, written in a mode that rarely gets much respect. It’s exquisitely ironic.” “The presiding message of the novel is that we must forgive Emma for her shortcomings just as she can and does learn to excuse the

sometimes vexing people around her. There is, I believe, more wisdom in that than in many, many more portentous and ambitious novels. Emma is flawed, but ‘Emma’ is flawless."

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New York Times

It’s a small but striking and instructive demonstration, the careful way Emma appraises the character of the various men who jockey for her attentions and those of the women around her. We could all learn from her example.

The Guardian (UK)

"In January 1814, Jane Austen sat down to write a revolutionary novel. Emma, the book she composed over the next year, was to change the shape of what is possible in fiction."

"The novel’s stylistic innovations allow it to explore not just a character’s feelings, but, comically, her deep

ignorance of her own feelings. "

"Those who condemn the novel by saying that its heroine is a snob miss the point. Of course she is. But Austen, with a refusal of moralism worthy of Flaubert, abandons her protagonist to her snobbery and confidently risks inciting foolish readers to think that the author must be a snob too"

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