Not gonna lie, I am soooo happy that I can eventually close this book. And by that means I have read it all from the very beginning to the end / every single page of it / not a cowardly DNF. I'm so proud of my self.



Thank you.

The main problems of this book, that it took me so long to finish it, in my opinion, are:

1. The thickness of this book (no wonder Lol)

2. The mind-numbing life of high class society that makes the reading felt so repetitious. And also the minority of conflict that leads to a flat emotion of mine.

3. The limited romance of the couples, especially between Emma and.... (I can't say it). Well, I don't really mind for this reason. But to be honest, this is where the story got my whole attention. Seriously, why so late and so short?

Apart from my objection, with the thickness of the book, I got a much deeper description of the characters as well as the setting. How people interacted at that time and how high class people lived their lives. They liked to hold a party and spent time caring/interfering life of others (it could end up good or bad). And of course, this book gave me a bunch of life lessons and types of people's personalities. It's good. I like Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax, for most part of their personalities. They're both thoughtful women. And of course Mr. Knightley. He's my most favorite character here.

So, since I need to relax after gaining my victory over this book, I won't talk about the short story of this book. You can read the blurb on your own. Have fun for you all who plan to read this book or currently reading it. You can do it!

The second reading of Emma pleasantly surprised me. When the initial embarrassment of having under-appreciated this amazing work by Jane Austen passed, I was able to wallow myself in the pleasure this reading gave me. My former perception of the book, I realized, had arisen from my misconstruction of Emma Woodhouse. My strong dislike of her has clouded my judgment. But now the sky is cleared, I've truly fallen in love with the book, and in justice to both the book and the author, am compelled to amend my review.

Emma Woodhouse is quite a different heroine to what we are used to in an Austen novel. We are used to the all-good type. But Emma is not so. In Austen's words, Emma is "handsome, clever and rich", a first in a work of hers. For the first time, Jane Austen has sorted out an upper-class heroine who enjoys "the power of having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself". Proud, conscious of her high rank, overly satisfied in her judgment, Emma Woodhouse's treatment toward the community of Highbury is one of condescension. Except for Mr. Knightley and her beloved Westons, Emma considers all others to be below her in rank and shows them only a dutiful kindness without any true warmth which is required of one of her station in life. Little that she foresees of the consequences of her own vanity, envy, and misjudgment, happily meddling with one young woman's life and gossiping about another. But when her very happiness is threatened, the influence of the one man she loves properly humbles her and makes her see her own faults.

I truly liked Emma and was very much charmed by her this time. Not that she was easy to tolerate, but I could better understand and appreciate her innate good qualities which come out in full force when she receives a rough shake to her heart.

Mr. Knightley, on the other hand, contributes to the weight of the story by being constant, strong, kind, open, and sensible. He is the opposite of Emma with his sincere respect for people of every rank and situation in life. Mr. Knightley is a real gentleman, and the gentleman any lady would wish for. I loved the character. He is one of the best Austen heroes.

Emma brings out the class distinction of the Regency society like no other Austen work. Everything is centered on it, love, marriage, and even association. Austen with her clever and witty writing satirically portrays this social “comedy”. There is romance alright. Austen wouldn’t have abandoned the popular theme, but it is the social role played by “rank” that has engaged her mind when writing Emma.

It is a light and entertaining work, and a touch of comicality made it all the more enjoyable. It is also a complete work with a beautiful story, characters from different stations of life, social criticism, all being closely knitted into a perfect and wonderful piece of literature.

With Emma, four of Jane Austen novels have become my favourties. Perhaps, I’m partial because of my love for her, but I’m confident in my assertion that none can challenge her brilliancy in writing, in her ability to create lifelike and universally loved and respected characters, and her talent in painting a true picture of Regency society.

I hope not to raise any of my friends’ sensibilities when I tell you that although I liked Emma, I did not love it. Emma simply did not move me.
n  

"With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed everybody's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken. She had brought evil on Harriet, on herself, and she too much feared, on Mr. Knightley."

n
I liked the hilarity of her well-meaning but misdirected attempts at match making, I liked the satire of Jane Austen’s prose and the well developed characters. I enjoyed reading about the intentionally annoying Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton, the first incessantly chatty, the second bossy and interfering. I suffered along with Mr. Woodhouse for all his maladies, and I really liked Mr. Knightley, and how he relates to Emma. However, I kept waiting for more. I thought the love stories lacked romance, they seemed an after thought or simply lacked deeper feelings, and I am a romantic at heart.

Maybe I am being too strict in granting Emma only 3 stars, but I think it appropriate compared with my ratings of 4 stars for n  Persuasionn and n  Sense and Sensibilityn, and 5 stars for n  Pride and Prejudicen. Nevertheless, recommended.

I'm sorry to say but this book really irritated me. And Mr. Knightley is a prick.

Emma was incredibly fun, and I loved the almost rivals-to-lovers dynamic between Emma and Mr. Knightley (though their age gap paired with how long he claims to have liked her is icky). But the same silly side characters who made me laugh and enjoy Emma's snarky comments started to be a bit annoying after so many pages. I think some parts could have been condensed a bit or removed entirely. 3.5 stars

emma is an icon, a girlboss

It took me longer to read this than any other Austen novel. It's a lot denser than her usual effortless breezy brilliance and it's also more nuanced and a little darker. For the first time she creates a central female character who isn't likeable. Emma is smug, she's a snob and she's a classic control freak. She tends to disapprove of any coupling she herself hasn't helped bring about. She herself, devoted to her ailing and rather tiresome father, maintains she will never marry. The narrative creates lots of mischief around Emma's snobbery and smug complacency. There's a lot of crossed wires in this novel. It seems what most interests Austen is how misunderstanding can create thickets in which we get lost. A lot of the time people are talking at each other rather than with each other.

Every character has a fixed social position in the novel which determines prospects and at the end no one it has to be said has shifted much so it might appear Austen shares a little of Emma's snobbery.

I realised while reading this that one mark of a brilliant novel is that there comes a moment in the narrative when you are compelled to re-evaluate everything that has come before. This happens in Emma and it's when you realise you're in the hands of a masterful storyteller. If only modern romance novels possessed a smidgen of the artistry of Miss Austen.

Jane Austen described Emma as one “ whom no one but myself will much like.” Did I find this to be true?

My first impression of Emma was that she was doted upon by everyone in her circle. She felt she could do no wrong and that what she believed and felt was always right. She judged people harshly, often based on their social status as well as by their looks and manners.

“The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments.”

So, initially I did not much care for her. But as the novel progressed, the author very brilliantly and subtly has Emma come to an “AHH” moment.

“With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings, with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken, and she had not quite done nothing- for she had done mischief.”

Emma’s counterpart is Mr. Knightley- a logical, practical man who really does have his eyes open and is able to see people for who they are. He is ~ 15 years older than Emma. She is 21 and he in his upper 30’s. He will correct her if he disagrees with her. Of course, she does not take this well.

“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”

Jane Austen’s novels are character driven. We get to know all the “higher” class people in this town. They run from people you love to people you hate- Mrs. Elton definitely being in the hate category, for me. They are always visiting each other, sharing their letters with each other and worrying constantly about catching cold.

By the end of the novel, I was definitely on Emma’s side. From a coddled young woman, she progresses to a mature young woman- a woman who realizes her true self.

I read this for the first time in my teens- I liked it but did not love it. This time, I fell in love with this brilliantly evocative story.

I reread Emma in preparation for an Austen course I will be taking in Oxford this summer.

Published: 1816

Emma, a book I wrote about (and Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion in some paper in the eighties) is a really, really good book about an exasperating main character. This is my first re-reading in decades, maybe only my second reading ever, but I just reread Pride and thought I’d do a little informal comparison. This is the last book published in Austen’s lifetime, and when she was about to publish it, she admitted that she didn’t think anyone would like Emma:

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

"With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed everybody's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken. She had brought evil on Harriet, on herself, and she too much feared, on Mr. Knightley."

“Badly done, Emma!”

Yet. . .

“This sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults."

This is more sheer comedy (the basis for the spinoff movie Clueless) than Pride, but still very very good, not merely silly. That progression of quotes tells Emma Woodhouse is complex. Emma (the novel) is a comedy of manners, focused on marriage, sex, and social status. Emma is spoiled, arrogant, a terrible matchmaker, a meddler. She’s exasperating, but as things proceed with Knightley, she grows on you. I like Pride much better, but this is really, really well-written with good social satire.

So I have now read all of Austen's novels (though admittedly some so long ago  but not when they first came out admittedly that repeat readings might be a good idea.

Emma reminded me of the joke: a man is travelling in France, feeling hungry he goes into a restaurant and orders an omelette. Having eaten it the waiter comes back out, takes the plate and asks the man if he liked it. The man says 'I didn't think it was very nice', to which the waiter says 'Nice! It is not meant to be nice! It is meant to be perfect!'.

So too Emma. The title character is there only to be knocked down and put in her place, this is a story in the Pygmalion tradition, in the absense of perfect spouses, you obviously have to make your own more or less brutally. My problem here is the same as with reading Marianne in Sense and Sensibility Emma is a terrible snob, and in the six month or so course of the novel she is extremely rude once to one person, but she does not seem so bad as to need to the corrections that she gets  from the man who will eventually marry her, this is a novel in the tradition of telling girls that the boy who is nasty to them and who picks on them actually really likes them, or alternatively this is a novel about control and social policing It came over to me as rough, even brutal in places. Emma has these Romantic flights of fancy which reminded me of  The Female Quixote - imagining that people are attracted to each other who aren't, while being blind to who is actually interested in whom. I think that alone would be enough to drive a small town / big village comedy of manners of more or less everyday very rich people in Regency England, but Austen had other ideas.

But then again this is a novel about power and control and community, and therefore if Emma is not going to come out on top then she must be taken down a rung or two, so structurally it is important that she is corrected.

One thing that is quickly apparent is that this is a community story and you feel these lines of thread reaching across the fabric and connecting the characters together, particularly through charity (which is a form of community building), who is a patron and who is patronised is soon apparent. This can be funny, Emma's hypochondriac father is very controlling, and her flights of Romantic fancy are I imagine the only escape she can get from him, not that he gives the impression of being controlling but his fear of people getting chills and catching cold is stifling, his consistent mystification at other people not wanting to live as super cautiously as he does with his evening bowl of smooth gruel is amusing all through the book.

Naturally with all these threads floating about there is a lot of knot tying, the novel begins after a marriage, and iirc three, no four  ! so many that it is hard to keep count of them all!  more marriages occur before the novel finally ends.

This is properly conservative and patriotic novel so all the marriages confirm the appropriate and time honoured social order, one reason why Emma gets corrected by Mr Knightley, who as his name suggests is policing the bounds of the community, protecting it from threats, is that a Romantic match making fantasy of her's does threaten the social order, which is tantamount to storming the Bastille. There's a certain amount of play on ideas of Englishness, being untainted, and appropriateness, we can sense that Mr Churchill is a bad apple because he is interested in going abroad, other characters, however super rich they are, go no further than Weymouth, Southend or Bath. Knightley's knightly duties include embodying Christian virtues, specifically the duty (or joy, or practice) of charity, and loving one's neighbour  figuratively and literally  and standings in shining and comic contrast to the actual clergyman, the snobbish Mr Elton.

A great feature is how Austen builds up the sense of community, I felt the presence of various named persons even though they don't appear in the narrative action but are only talked about by other characters  I felt sad when Mrs Churchill died, I wondered even if her grandson had had a hand in her death, he certainly had motive and probably opportunity.

Although ideologically the story is conservative, Austen's technique is not, she has several patches of group dialogue - snatches of phrases - broken up by - dashes - suggesting somebody hearing - by not paying close attention to what a group of people are saying. The narration is also told from Emma's (biased) point of view, it is a step towards a stream of (un)consciousness, so we experience this world not just through hearing what people say or do while they are in the same room as Emma, but also how Emma reacts and what she thinks about those things.

In this podcast listen to a few literary types being predictably and delightfully enthusiastic about the book, one suggests that you can read it ten times over and still find new aspects to it - so there you go, if you are ever about to be marooned on a bookless island by pirates, but are kindly offered the choice of a single book to take with you, perhaps Emma is one to think about.

I read somewhere that Austen sent a copy of Emma to Maria Edgeworth, I can't say that I see much relation between  Castle Rackrent and Emma - apart from maybe the sense of a closed society that refers to a wider social circle around it which is not seen and the narrative voice that sees everything but doesn't comprehend what it sees  which admittedly comes to quite a lot of similarity!  

This is also the Austen novel which has young women frightened by Gypsies who promptly flee the narrative before they can be arrested by the magistrates for said crime, and a would be governess asserting that her threatened future occupation will be worse than slavery - quite rare glimpses of the wider world.

before she began writing this novel, JA said, ‘i am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.’ and sis, if that aint the truth.

its not like i hated emma - there are far worse characters out there - its just that she annoyed me to no end. no one likes a inconsiderate/conceited busy-body and, to me, i never got the sense that emma was truly sorry for her actions in the end, which makes all of her meddling unredeemable.

but i appreciate mr. knightleys character as hes the ONLY person who calls emma out on her poor behaviour. hes the highlight of this entire novel for me - hes kind, considerate, and notices others. hes way too good for emma, in my opinion.

sadly, my lack of love for the title character prevented me from loving this, but i can understand the storys popularity throughout time and the appeal of JAs writing.

↠ 2.5 stars

Jane Austen seems to be a rather divisive figure as of late. You love her for her wit, her irony, her gentle but pointed depictions of manners and love. Or you hate her because she seems to be harking back to an age of prescribed gender roles and stultifying drawing room conversation. I am of the former camp.

Emma may be one of her more divisive novels and the title character one of her more controversial creations. Or perhaps that should be – one of her more irritating creations. She exasperates readers: people are annoyed by her as they are annoyed by people like Emma in real life. She is a snob, she is a busybody, she is high-handed and she puts her great intellect in service of manipulating the people around her; and all through this, she is utterly convinced of her strong ideals and her noble aims. But this is exactly why I love her. I don’t yearn for perfection in heroes and heroines. I like them real, imperfect, deluded, flawed.

It is important to recognize that Austen somewhat stacks the deck by surrounding her heroine with a loveable (and sometimes not so loveable) gallery of soft-headed nitwits and ne’er-do-wells. How can a person of such superior intellect, such depth of spirit, do else but try to improve their lot? She is only trying to be of service to them, to all of the imperfect humans who cross her path! I can’t help but empathize with her clearly Virgoan tendencies to reform and to improve – and to serve, in her own way.

When reading about Emma’s zany hijinks, part of me stood back in awe at her ability to fool herself so utterly. And another part of me wanted to kiss those foolish, snobby little comments off of her no-doubt lovely face. But yet I don’t think I have a crush on Emma, it is more of a brotherly feeling. She’s like the ideal bossy older sister – frustrating, annoying, convinced of her superiority - yet kind beyond measure, golden of heart. Wonderfully flawed.