Just in case you thought I was going to be ignoring the classics in my list of “The 100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” think again: my novel #7 (alphabetically) is Jane Austen’s Emma, her final novel published during her lifetime (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818). Austen has long been recognized as one of the great novelists in the English language. The great Cambridge University literary critic F.R. Leavis, in his important 1948 work The Great Tradition, famously included only five authors in his catalog of the “great” novelists in English: they were George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, to some extent D.H. Lawrence, and, you guessed it, Jane Austen. Many people consider Emma to be Austen’s greatest novel (though a case could certainly be made for Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, or especially Pride and Prejudice), but for my purposes, I’m focusing on Emma today.
Emma has been recognized on the Guardian’s list and the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest novels. It also appears on the BBC’s catalog of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” a list compiled for the BBC by Jane Ciabattari, who surveyed 82 literary critics from around the world—none of them British themselves—for a list of which novels by British writers were most esteemed in the eyes of the world. Emma came in at number 19 on that list.
Like all of Austen’s novels, Emma is essentially a comedy of manners. Since most of the “great novels” of the English speaking world are either tragic (like Things Fall Apart), satiric (like Hitchhiker’s Guide), realist (like Little Women), or fantasy (like Watership Down), it’s refreshing to consider a true, traditional comedy, which is part of what makes Emmaso entertaining and enjoyable a read.
The novel, set in the small fictional village of Highbury, follows the relationships among the more important families of that tiny village, itself a microcosm of early nineteenth century society of Regency England, a society in which estates were entailed upon male relatives, and women could not inherit. A society in which, as a result, women were absolutely concerned primarily with marriage as, essentially, their only possible road to success and respectability was to make a good marriage. By which is meant finding a wealthy husband. Emma herself is, however, immune from this necessity: She has a personal fortune from her father that will allow her to live comfortably on her own, and thus, relieved of the pressure that most of her class and gender would feel, she is able to maneuver in this society with the agency of a man.
In this particular novel, Austen has created a protagonist whom, she wrote “no one but myself will much like.” Emma enters our perceptions with the first sentence of the novel: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition…had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress and vex her.” And from that sentence on we meet a young woman who is spoiled, vain, and used to being admired and having her opinions flattered and agreed to by nearly everyone in her small pond of Highbury, in which she is the biggest fish.
As Austen’s story unfolds, it follows Emma, after successfully playing matchmaker between her governess Miss Taylor and neighbor Mr. Weston, trying out her matchmaking skills on her new friend, the orphan Harriet Smith. Trying to find Harriet a superior match so that the poor girl can “marry up,” and in her self-centeredness believing she knows better than Harriet herself what the girl needs in a husband, she convinces Harriet to reject the honest farmer Robert Martin’s suit and tries to hook her up with the vicar Philip Elton, a scheme she has to abandon when she realizes Elton is only interested in herself. Emma herself is interested in Frank Churchill, the equally self-centered son of Mr. Weston, who is in line to inherit a large estate from his uncle. Her neighbor and close family friend Mr. Knightley seems equally interested in another poor newcomer to the village, Jane Fairfax, the poor but highly accomplished niece of Emma’s poor neighbors, Miss and Mrs. Bates. Knightley is a close friend of Emma’s father, who is one of those exaggerated “humors” characters going back in English comedy all the way to Ben Jonson. The hypochondriacal old man feels drafts everywhere in the house and hides behind screens, and is so often troubled by indigestion that he craves the blandest possible foods, and feels heartfelt sorrow for friends who are forced to eat rich fancy fare. Knightley is also close to Miss Bates, an annoying chatterbox who in the novel’s famous “Box Hill Picnic” episode becomes the brunt of Emma’s sarcastic wit, which she considers entertaining but which only serves to emphasize her cluelessness about how her whims affect those around her. Mr. Knightley sees fit to chide her for these failings like a big brother handing out an honest but unwelcome truth.
I won’t throw in any spoilers about the novel’s developments in case you haven’t read it. There are many surprises in the story, and Emma’s character arc is fascinating to watch as it unfolds. More than a simple comedy, the novel is a brilliant depiction of gender and class roles in British society at this particular historical juncture, but it is also a more universal study of human relationships and human frailties as well as virtues. That universality has manifested itself in recent adaptations of the novel, most notably, I suppose, the 1995 film Clueless, set in a modern Beverly Hills high school. If that’s not universal, I don’t know what is.