#53--Emma

I am in love with Jane Austen’s work and she is still, after more than a century, the preeminent romanticist.

I’ve mentioned several times before that when it comes to love stories, I’m much more interested in married couples keeping their relationship alive rather than in watching them meet and realize that they are in love with each other.  That’s still overall true, but I’m still a sap and a good falling in love story can still suck me in, and nobody does that better than Jane Austen.  And Emma is the best book of hers that I’ve read thus far.

Emma is much like Pride & Prejudice in that the plot depends on the heroines’ being fairly bad judges of character.  With Elizabeth Bennett, she has a blind spot when it comes to her family and completely misjudges Darcy and Willoughby.  However, where Elizabeth’s judgment is limited to a select group of people, Emma is wrong in her opinion about everybody.

Emma is a rich, spoiled brat who views the world as she wants it to be.  She has no interest in getting married herself, but she is zealously playing matchmaker for her own friends.  Taking too much credit for setting up her governess’s marriage, she sets out to find a perfect match for her friend, Harriet.  Her “goodwill” towards Harriet results only in steadily making Harriet’s life worse.  And the irony is that Harriet thinks Emma is her best friend in the world.

Mr. Knightley is the only person who tries to set Emma straight, but Emma is much too willful to recognize good advice when it’s slapping her in the face.  It’s because of this that Emma is my favorite character of Jane Austen.  Emma has the strongest character arc of the heroines that I’ve so far read.

Emma is smart and charming, but she’s also oblivious and downright mean-spirited.  The Box Hill chapter highlights how witty and hurtful she can be to the silly but otherwise well-intentioned people in her society.  Mr. Knightley’s chastisement of her later is one of the best moments in the book.  It was past time somebody told her how awful she is.

The characters are quirky and vibrant.  I love her hypochondriac father and the loquacious Miss Bates.  And Jane Fairfax is a very interesting foil Emma, and by the end, you realize the wasted opportunity Emma could have had in being her friend.

And, of course, like all great stories, there’s the beautiful language that Austen uses in her storytelling.  My favorite line: “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 where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.”

It’s no secret I love this book.  It’s times like this I’m really glad I decided to do this Must Read list.