Can You Buy Real Tramadol Online I have made no secret of my desire, in my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” to include as many different authors as I could, to spread the love among a variety of periods and styles. But in the end there were two particular novelists whose contributions to English literature were so prodigious that I couldn’t bring myself to represent them with only a single novel. One of these is Jane Austen. If I were forced to choose just one of Austen’s novels, one favorite option might be Emma, included here as number seven (alphabetically) on my “most lovable” Emma was Austen’s 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 of best novels written in English, and the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest world 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. It was 83rd on the “Top 100 Books” as chosen by Canadians, 75th on the Australian Big Read, 55th on the “100 Favorite Novels of Librarians,” 40th on the BBC “Big Read,” and number 8 on the Guardian’s “50 Best-Loved Novels Written by a Woman.”
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 A Farewell to Arm), satiric (like Hitchhiker’s Guide), realistic (like Babbit), 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. These are the particular concerns of Pride and Prejudice, as we’ve seen. 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. Indeed, she doesn’t feel the need of a man at all, and says early in the novel:
“Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall.”
In this particular novel, Austen has created a protagonist whom, she wrote “no one but myself will much like.” And for much of the novel you may feel the same way. Emma enters our perceptions with the book’s first sentence: “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.
In short, the story follows Emma’s attempts, after successfully having matched her governess Miss Taylor, with her neighbor Mr. Weston, decides to turn her matchmaking skills to a bigger challenge: finding a superior match that will allow her new orphan friend Harriet Smith to “marry up.” With her self-centeredness giving her the blind faith that she knows better than Harriet herself what the girl needs, Emma convinces Harriet to turn down an offer of marriage from the honest and well-situated farmer Robert Martin and tries to steer her toward a match with local vicar Philip Elton, a scheme she has to abandon when she realizes Elton is only interested in herself. Meanwhile Emma has designs on Mr. Weston’s somewhat narcissistic son Frank Churchill, who is a bit of a flirtatious cad but stands to inherit a huge estate from his uncle. And George Knightley seems to be most interested in another newcomer to the village, Jane Fairfax, the poor but accomplished niece of villagers Miss and Mrs. Bates, who dote on her. Yet there seems to be a clear bond between Emma and old family friend Mr. Knightley (whose younger brother is married to Emma’s older sister), and who bestows on her the familiar and sometimes unwelcome paternal guidance of a big brother handing out an honest but unwelcome truth. Knightley by the end of the book shows himself to be well aware of how his advice, merited as it was, must have sometimes been a hard pill to swallow:
“I cannot make speeches, Emma…If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
If you can’t tell how these complications untie themselves I won’t spoil it for you. There are a good number surprises in the story, but this novel is lovable for many other reasons, among them the characters. Knightley is consistently admirable, in part because he sees value in a whole range of characters—Robert Martin for instance, whom Emma considers beneath the notice of her poor friend Harriet, but also Emma’s not particularly likable 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. Of all the surprises in the novel, Emma’s character arc is most 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. Gwyneth Paltrow took a crack at Jane Austen’s clueless heroine a year later, in 1996 (two years before her Oscar-winning stab at Hamlet in Shakespeare in Love). More recently, first-time director Autumn de Wilde, with a history of making music videos, created a new film version in 2020 complete with beautiful cinematography and an innovative use of music, particularly of traditional English folk songs. That version of the film also includes memorable performances by Bill Nighy as Emma’s hypochondriacal father, and Miranda Hart as Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax’s annoyingly chattering aunt who becomes the brunt of Emma’s unthinking cruel humor. These are worth the price of admission. But this newer version of the film wanders far from Austen’s novel in placing hordes of servants around Emma and around Knightley in their huge manor houses. These have no equivalent in Austen’s novel. To be sure, we know that Emma is “handsome, clever, and rich,” but she’s not that rich. She just happens to be the queen bee in this small village.
Thus I still prefer Paltrow’s performance: she played Emma more sympathetically, as someone who seemed to be motivated chiefly by sincerely wanting to help her friends. In the more recent version, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Emma seems more of the spoiled rich girl whose machinations are (perhaps unconsciously) motivated more by her desire to exercise her own powers of manipulation and her enjoyment in having Harriet as a kind of loyal serf. Both interpretations are possible readings of Austen’s text—indeed Austen herself comments upon human beings’ talent for self-deception:
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.
But I prefer the earlier interpretation. I also prefer the gravitas that Jeremy Northam brings to the role of Knightley opposite Paltrow’s Emma than Johnny Flynn’s much more emotional turn in the newer film, which seems unwarranted by Austen’s text. I recommend you watch either or both versions, and Clueless too while you’re at it. But read Austen’s novel first, because there’s nothing better than her prose.