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Emma by Jane Austen (BA)


Emma is a novel of courtship and social manners. The majority of the book focuses on the question of marriage: who will marry whom and for what reasons will they marry : love, practicality, or necessity? At the centre of the narration is the title character, Emma Woodhouse , a heiress who lives with her widowed father at their estate, Hartfield. Noted for her beauty and cleverness, Emma is somewhat wasted in the small village of Highbury  but takes a great deal of pride in her matchmaking skills. Unique among other women her age, she has no particular need to marry : she is in the unique situation of not needing a husband to supply her fortune.

Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. In the first sentence, she introduces the title character as “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich. Emma is spoiled, headstrong and itself satisfied; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people’s lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray.

“Miss Emma Woodhouse was a handsome, clever and rich woman of twenty-one, with very little to distress or worry her in her life”.

This is the very first sentence of the novel in which the novelist introduces the readers with the main protagonist and the principle character, namely miss Emma Woodhouse. Jane Austen with exact precision gives the detailed characteristics of Emma. The novelist chief ingredients of fiction narrative characters reflections and dramatic dialogues. Five short paragraphs of descriptive narration present the 20 years old Emma Woodhouse as an ideal but still very human, “handsome, clever and rich, with comfortable home and happy disposition”, whose life had brought very little to distress or vex her.

Her elder sister having been married, Emma , from an early age, has been the mistress of Hartfield, her widowed father’s house. Her mother’s place had for sixteen years been field by Miss Taylor first as a governess and then as a companion and close friend. Her judgment Emma had valued highly while “doing just as she liked”.

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think too well of herself. For this reason Emma used her imagination and fancy to make the wrong matches.

Although we know Emma to be a snobbish girl, we find that she is full of sympathy for people who are really poor and needy.
One day Emma had to pay a charitable visit to a poor sick family living in a little way out of Higbury. Emma took Harriet along with her on this visit. On the way, Harriet asked Emma when the later would get married. Harriet’s reply was that she was not going to get married at all. In any case, she was not in love, she said, and there was no question of her getting married without her being in love.

This novel has been adapted for several films, many television programmes, and a long list of stage plays. It is also the inspiration for several novels.

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