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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