Jane Austen was born in December 1775 in Steventon, a country village in Hampshire about 75 miles west of London, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and the former Cassandra Leigh. George Austen was an Oxford scholar without any money of his own, but with an uncle who helped him become rector of the parishes of Steventon and Deane. Austen’s mother was also a clergyman’s daughter, without a dowry, though she was descended from a Duke of Chandos and a Baron Leigh of Stoneleigh. Because the Austen family was large it was always strapped for cash: five sons had to be educated for some profession,1 and George Austen was forced to supplement his income from the church by tutoring, in his home, young men studying for the university entrance exams. Jane’s eldest brother James, a precocious scholar, followed his father into the clergy. The next‐oldest brother Edward charmed his father’s cousins, Thomas and Catherine Knight, who owned extensive landed property at Godmersham in Kent and Chawton in Hampshire; they were childless and the Austens agreed to let the Knights adopt him. Jane’s favorite brother Henry went through several professions: he first became an officer in the Oxfordshire militia, then a banker in London, and finally took orders as a clergyman after the failure of his bank. There was no money for Frank and Charles, Jane’s youngest brothers, so they enrolled in the free Naval Academy in Portsmouth; both of them became captains of warships during the Napoleonic Wars, made fortunes in prize money, and rose to the rank of Admiral, Frank ultimately becoming Sir Francis Austen, Admiral of the Fleet.
Except for two brief stays at boarding schools in Southampton and in Reading, Jane Austen and her older sister Cassandra lived their entire lives within their close‐knit family, a circle that narrowed as her brothers acquired their own households and moved away, and as their father aged, retired from the ministry to the city of Bath in 1801, and died there in January of 1805. Neither of them ever married, since for marriage, among the gentry, a couple needed a gentleman’s income, either from inherited wealth or from some genteel occupation. In 1794 Cassandra became engaged to Thomas Fowle, a clergyman who had been one of her father’s pupils, and who expected to inherit a family living in Shropshire. It was in the hope of acquiring wealth enough to marry sooner that in 1796 Fowle accepted a position as military chaplain in the West Indies, where he caught yellow fever and died the following year, leaving Cassandra his entire fortune of £1000.2
We know from Jane Austen’s own letters that she attracted and flirted with a number of men, most of whom she knew could not afford to court a woman with nothing to bring to the marriage.3 She did have one serious proposal when she was 27, in December 1802, from Harris Bigg‐Wither, the younger brother of two of her close friends. Austen accepted his proposal and then, the next morning, sent a letter withdrawing from the engagement. We can understand why she might have been tempted to accept: Bigg‐Wither was the heir to Manydown Park, an estate of 5000 acres in Hampshire, where she could have provided a home not only for herself but for her mother and sister after her father’s death. We do not know for certain why she changed her mind, but Austen biographers suggest that the man himself was six years younger and by various accounts clumsy, inarticulate and unintelligent. More cannot be said, as Austen’s letters from this period in her life do not survive. Had Austen become Mrs. Bigg‐Wither, as another woman did two years later, she might well have been far too occupied with children and household management to write and publish six novels.
After George Austen’s death his pension ceased, and the two sisters and their mother moved from expensive Bath to cheaper lodgings in other towns for several years until, in 1809, Edward Austen Knight offered them Chawton Cottage, part of the Knight estate, on the edge of the South Downs. It was fifteen miles southeast of Steventon, where her brother James Austen was rector. There the Austen women resided for the rest of their lives. For Jane that was not to be long: beginning in 1816, she had symptoms of abdominal pain, night fevers and debilitating weakness that progressed to make walking and even writing impossible.4 In May of 1817, she made her will and moved to a rented room in Winchester to be near to a doctor whom she trusted; in July she died there and was buried in Winchester Cathedral, under a stone that makes no reference to the fact that she wrote six of the best‐loved novels in English.
Austen’s writing may have begun as early as 1787, at the age of 11, after she had returned from boarding school in Reading to the crowded house at Steventon, which was filled with novels and brothers proposing that Jane act in amateur theatricals. Most of Austen’s adolescent works are short satirical skits on the fiction popular in that period, and even the earliest pieces are crammed with sentences that take a witty or surprising turn: “[Frederic and Elfrida] were exceedingly handsome and so much alike that it was not every one who knew them apart. Nay even their most intimate friends had nothing to distinguish them by, but the shape of the face, the colour of the Eye, the length of the Nose and the difference of the complexion.” In Love and Freindship (1790), a wicked parody of the sentimental novel in letters, Sophia dies from fainting too often, uttering these last words: “My fate will teach you this. I die a Martyr to my greif for the loss of Augustus. One fatal swoon has cost me my Life. Beware of swoons Dear Laura …. A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences – Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint.” The longest of these youthful productions is Catherine, or The Bower (1792), which runs to novella length, some 17,000 words. All of them were written for the pleasure of her family, to whom Austen read them aloud, and by good fortune a fair copy of all of them survives, in three notebooks, which she made at her father’s request to preserve her juvenilia.5
Between 1795 and 1798 Austen began drafting her first three novels, “Elinor and Marianne,” which eventually became Sense and Sensibility, “First Impressions,” an early epistolary version of Pride and Prejudice, and “Susan,” an early version of Northanger Abbey. Nothing came of these efforts at the time: in 1797 George Austen offered “First Impressions” to the publisher Thomas Cadell, who declined it sight unseen. The copyright to “Susan” was sold in 1803 to Crosby & Co., for £10, but the publisher failed to issue the novel; to reclaim her manuscript Austen had to buy the copyright back for the same price in 1809.
It was only after the move to Chawton that year that Austen began the process of seriously revising her early novels for publication. With her banker brother Henry doing the negotiation for her, she issued Sense and Sensibility in 1811 through publisher Thomas Egerton “on commission” – meaning that the Austens put up the money for the expenses of printing and advertising the work, and paying Egerton in addition a percentage of the income from the sale of the book. The first edition sold out, netting Austen £140. She sold the copyright of Pride and Prejudice to Egerton outright for £110 – which turned out to be a financial mistake, since the novel became popular; Egerton issued two editions in 1813 and probably made four times what he had paid for the copyright. Austen invested her profits in “Navy Fives,” bonds yielding 5 percent interest, and boasted in a letter to her sailor brother Frank, of having “written myself into £250.”6 Like most writers, Austen was delighted by the money she made from the sale of her books, the first independent income she had ever had. For Mansfield Park, Austen went back to the “commission” system, making perhaps £350 on Egerton’s first edition (1814). When she switched publishers to John Murray in 1815, she turned down his offer of £450 for all her available copyrights. But there were risks to the commission system as well: Emma (1815), the last novel published in her lifetime, was slow to sell out its large first edition, and the second edition of Mansfield Park cost more to print than it made back in sales. But even in the last year of Austen’s life she continued to work, despite declining health, on completing Persuasion, and she drafted eleven chapters of a new novel to be titled Sanditon.
Jane Austen’s posthumous reputation has been an almost unprecedented success story. During her lifetime, she was unknown – her books were all issued anonymously – and only Emma was seriously reviewed (notably by Walter Scott in the Quarterly Review). After the initial editions her novels went out of print. But in 1833 publisher Richard Bentley began a “Standard Novels” series, including all six of Austen’s, with a brief biographical preface by her brother Henry. This edition brought Austen’s name before the reading public for the first time. Bentley’s editions were reissued throughout the nineteenth century, with nephew James Edward Austen‐Leigh’s more detailed “Memoir of Jane Austen” replacing Henry’s biography in 1869.
Appreciated by Scott and by critic Richard Whately in the Romantic period, she came into her own in the Victorian era, when George Eliot’s partner George Henry Lewes compared Austen’s realistic skill and dramatic economy to that of Homer and Shakespeare; she was praised as well by Anthony Trollope and Henry James. Fancy illustrated editions and cheap paperbacks of her novels proliferated, and she became a popular favorite, not only with the wealthy and secure, but with soldiers in the trenches of World War I, as is suggested in Rudyard Kipling’s story “Janeites.” These reprintings culminated in the R.W. Chapman critical edition for Oxford University Press (1923), the first of any British novelist, which testified to the seriousness with which Austen’s novels were being taken. In 1948 critic F.R. Leavis viewed her as the founder of a “great tradition” of social realism, and in the decades since then literary critics of every theoretical bent have penned several hundred books analyzing Austen’s novels. Meanwhile, since the 1990s literally dozens of film and video adaptations of her work have come out, both testifying to and increasing her popularity, which is rivaled among English novelists only by Charles Dickens.
All of Jane Austen’s novels are, in a sense, variations on the “marriage plot” or courtship novel that began with Richardson’s Pamela and was developed by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, among others. For Austen as well as her predecessors, most of these have “Cinderella” plots in which a poor (or at least not wealthy or self‐sufficient) young woman finds a “prince” who falls in love with her and, after many complications, asks successfully for her hand in marriage. Richardson’s Pamela is a servant‐girl, Burney’s Evelina a young lady whose legitimacy is in question, and Edgeworth’s Belinda (from the 1801 novel of that name) a young lady of London without money or fashionable connections. Other than Emma Woodhouse, all of Austen’s heroines are Cinderellas: Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is almost literally a Cinderella, since she is a poor relation taken into Sir Thomas Bertram’s household as a favor to her family. She lives in an unheated attic room, and is used as a kind of servant by her aunts at Mansfield. Most of the others are merely gentlewomen without dowries worth speaking of: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility are children of a second marriage displaced into near‐abject poverty on their father’s decease – a state of affairs that Jane Austen understood quite well from her own experience. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s father is alive, but his country house and lands are entailed and will go to a foolish distant cousin upon his death. Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey is one of ten children of a beneficed clergyman – another situation Austen understood from experience. Anne Elliot of Persuasion may be the daughter of a proud baronet, but her father’s extravagance has nearly bankrupted them, to the point where he must rent out his already mortgaged estate. And finally, there is a Cinderella in Emma, but it is Jane Fairfax, a secondary character, not the eponymous heroine.
We learn in the first sentence of the novel that Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich”: indeed, in chapter 16 we learn that at her elderly father’s death she will have £30,000 – enough to support a genteel household in luxury all by itself. She needs no husband to support her, and she fantasizes that she will never marry at all. Indeed, with her mother dead, her elder sister married and living in London, and her father in no danger of marrying again, she is already the mistress of the household, the female who runs her home and orders the work of the many servants.
The opening sentences of the novel suggest a very different sort of marriage plot, a plot that is typical of a Bildungsroman rather than a courtship novel. The chief instability of the plot, the threat to this heroine, is not outside but inside her: it is her character rather than her situation that is the problem, her narcissism, her arrogance and conceit. Emma needs to get wise to herself. The word “seemed” in the first sentence telegraphs to the audience that while beauty, wealth and intelligence may seem to the best blessings of existence, they can be without value if they meet in a person who acts selfishly and without regard for the worth of others. The words “distress” and “vex” let us know that this will be a punitive comedy, but that the punishment of Emma Woodhouse will be limited to feelings of distress and vexation, the uneasy pains that teach us to look into the mirror and worry about who we have become. And the phrase “at present” in the last quoted sentence promises that the plot will be about her coming to know how much her happiness depends on her making changes in herself. In fact Austen said before writing Emma – according to Austen‐Leigh’s Memoir – “I am going to take a heroine whom nobody but myself will much like” and indeed she kept her promise. Emma Woodhouse can be difficult to like, indeed she can at times appear a monster of self‐regard, much like some of Austen’s comic villains (e.g. John Dashwood or Lady Catherine de Bourgh).
To make such a flawed character into the heroine of a comedy was a tour de force on Austen’s part. Austen had experimented with flawed heroines before: Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey imagines General Tilney a uxoricidal monster like the villains of her favorite novelist Anne Radcliffe until his son Henry encourages her to engage in some critical thinking; and Elizabeth Bennet is mortified by discovering what distorted notions she has swallowed, thanks to her prejudices, about Fitzwilliam Darcy and George Wickham. But whereas Catherine and Elizabeth endanger only their own happiness by their intellectual and moral flaws, Emma is a serious danger to others as well. Because this is a comedy, Emma will actually cause no serious or permanent damage; the particular quality of moral seriousness in this comedy requires more than that, though: it requires a change of heart on her part that will permanently socialize Emma’s narcissism into leadership of the small society of Highbury.
The plot of Emma comes the closest to Austen’s suggestion to her niece that a novel could be written about “two or three families in a country village.” In all her other novels characters travel about, to Bath or Lyme Regis or Pemberley in Derbyshire and we follow along with them, but Emma has strict unity of place: it never strays from the location of Highbury, a village in the county of Surrey sixteen miles from London, and almost all the major characters belong to four families, named Woodhouse, Knightley, Weston, and Bates. Its plot divides naturally into two parts of unequal length and complexity. But they are parallel in that, in each part, Emma Woodhouse operates according to her flawed assessment of herself and others in ways that not only “distress and vex” her, but threaten permanently the happiness of other characters whom we are made to view favorably.
The first shorter and simpler segment, complete in the first sixteen chapters of the novel, focuses on Emma’s relationship to Harriet Smith, a pretty young woman of unknown parentage who becomes for Emma a substitute for her friend and former governess. Emma manipulates Harriet into refusing the proposal of Robert Martin, a young tenant farmer on the estate of Emma’s bachelor brother‐in‐law, George Knightley, whom Harriet cares for, believing that the rector of the parish, an unmarried gentleman named Elton, would be a better match for Harriet – better for Harriet but also for Emma since by marrying into the gentry Harriet could remain in Emma’s intimate social circle. It soon becomes obvious that Elton is setting his cap, not for Harriet, “the natural daughter of somebody,” but for Emma the heiress herself, a fact she discovers only when, on their way home from a party on a snowy night, Elton seizes her hand and begins “making violent love to her,” and protesting that, far from courting Harriet, “I never thought of Miss Smith in the whole course of my existence.”
The disappointment Elton suffers is of no great concern to Emma or to us, but of course Emma has persuaded Harriet that Elton was in love with her, so there will have to be uncomfortable explanations and heartbreak for Harriet. But as we are made aware, it is not merely that Emma has tempted Harriet to expect a proposal from Elton, she has also persuaded her to reject one from Robert Martin, a hardworking and increasingly prosperous farmer who genuinely loves her. Harriet’s fate hangs over the comic plot: there must be a happy ending for her as well as for Emma. Emma’s happy ending will require a change of consciousness, but Harriet’s will only require that Robert Martin not forget her and devote his attentions to someone else.
The Martin/Harriet/Elton/Emma debacle achieves high comedy through our pleasure at watching Emma and Elton misread each other’s intentions and character. In chapter 6 Emma and Elton speak at cross‐purposes, first about Harriet’s character and temperament and then, with Emma raising the issue, the proposed portrait of Harriet. When Elton tells Emma that Harriet “was a beautiful creature when she came to you, but, in my opinion, the attractions you have added are infinitely superior to what she received from nature,” he means this as flattery to Emma, and given his intentions – to marry a fortune of £30,000 – the implication, on his side, is that he trusts her to form the character of their children with skill equal to that which she has exercised with her friend Harriet. Meanwhile Emma, for her part, takes all his compliments to Harriet’s beauty and amiability only as signs of growing affection for Harriet.
These failures to understand reach a high point when Emma decides to do a water‐color drawing of Harriet:
And when Emma shows Elton her drawings, she concludes with what she considers her best effort, of her sister Isabella’s husband, John Knightley, which she thought very accurate but refused to finish because her sister thought it did not do him justice:
Emma is shilly‐shallying about whether she should or should not return to painting portraits of family and friends partly to make the matter a subject of conversation between her and Elton and partly because of her inveterate self‐concern: she thought her portraits successful and was wounded by her sister’s criticism; she also wants to defuse any possible criticism by Elton, who has praised her water‐colors of people he may not have seen. Her mention of “husbands and wives” triggers a repetition by Elton that suggests he knows exactly what she means. Elton’s fawning responses are dictated partly by his usual cloying manners, but partly by his mistaken idea that Emma is doing what, in his past experience, young ladies do for men they are interested in: they preen by demonstrating their talents and accomplishments, like dancing and music, or in this case painting. “It will indeed … be an exquisite possession,” Elton says, denoting the painting as a figure for Emma Woodhouse and her fortune; for him the subject of the painting is immaterial: it will be a Woodhouse as a Rembrandt is a Rembrandt, and the original is quite valuable.
The self‐deception is mutual: each imputes an intention to the other agreeable to their plan for the other. If there is anything to choose between the two actors in this mutual self‐deception, it is Elton, in his egoistical assumption that Emma is preening for him, who may seem the more repulsive. But it is Emma who seems the more oblivious to the intentions of the other: Elton does not after all say, “Let me entreat you to exercise your talent in favour of your charming friend”; it is Emma’s talent that is described as “charming,” not her friend. This is a novel whose language is never slapdash, one that repays careful attention not only to what is said but to how it is said.
In the second part, the cast of characters expands as Augusta Elton, Jane Fairfax, and Frank Churchill join the characters whom we already know. Mrs. Elton, the Bristol‐bred bride with a dowry of “so many thousands as would always be called ten,”7 whom Elton brings back to Highbury after his failure with Emma, is primarily a textural figure, one of the three characters who exist to make us laugh. (The other two are Miss Bates, “a great talker upon little matters” whose chatter suggests synapses firing at random with a direct link to her mouth, and Mr. Woodhouse, Emma’s father, a hypochondriac who is incessantly worrying about his own health and everyone else’s in ways that threaten everyone else’s pleasure.) Mrs. Elton is awful, and awfully funny, because she highhandedly manages to say and do all the wrong things. She affectedly calls Elton her “caro sposo,” she expresses surprise that Mrs. Weston, Emma’s former governess, is “really quite the gentlewoman.” Worst of all, she challenges Emma’s title to be reigning queen of Highbury. Aside from the comedy of vulgarity within this genteel society, that is Augusta Elton’s primary function: by displaying all of Emma’s faults and none of her virtues, she saves us from disliking Emma quite as much as we otherwise would.
Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are connected by blood to characters we have met in the first part of the story. Jane is an orphan, Miss Bates’s niece; she has been well educated through the charity of Colonel Campbell, a friend of her late father, and is apparently destined to become a governess. Frank is Mr. Weston’s son by his first marriage, who has been adopted by the wealthy Churchills, his uncle and aunt on his late mother’s side. At a time before the novel begins, Frank and Jane have met at Weymouth – a seaside resort – have fallen in love, and become secretly engaged. They cannot marry at present, though, because Frank anticipates that if he declares his love for a penniless gentlewoman of no particular social rank he will be disinherited by his adoptive parents.
Like a mystery writer of the “cozy” school, Austen keeps the engagement a secret from us until it is revealed to the rest of the characters, although like a good mystery writer she scatters many clues about their relationship throughout the novel, clues that we would need to be quite clever to understand on a first reading of the novel. For example, in II.16, we learn that Jane Fairfax, though less than robust, walks to the post office every morning, even in wet weather. Well‐wishers attempt to dissuade, even forbid her from walking there, and offer to get her letters for her – advice and help she resolutely declines, insisting that she needs the morning walk for her health. On a first reading, we may notice only the tactlessness of John Knightley and the officiousness of the awful Mrs. Elton, and so on, but on a second reading, it will be obvious that Jane is engaged in a secret correspondence with Frank and is desperately fending off all neighborly attempts at interference with her freedom with every reason she can think of, including a wildly irrelevant paean to the incomparable accuracy of the post office.8 Similarly, we learn in II.9 that Frank has volunteered to fix the rivet that holds together Mrs. Bates’s spectacles, and we see him engaged in that job at the beginning of the next chapter with Mrs. Bates asleep and Jane “intent on her pianoforte.” On a first reading, this may seem to signify nothing at all, but on a second reading we realize that, with Miss Bates out shopping and with Mrs. Bates in a state of sensory deprivation – she is quite deaf and, without her glasses, blind – Jane and Frank are, for a short while, without an effective chaperone and can communicate with each other without reserve. Miss Bates’s comment on how long the repair job has taken Frank makes clear that fixing the rivet was not the only thing Frank had in mind.
One important reason why the actual relationship between Jane and Frank may not occur to us on a first reading is that the novel is largely focalized through Emma, who has a very different idea about Jane’s secret love life. Jane’s return home to Highbury is occasioned by the marriage of her friend, Colonel Campbell’s daughter, to a Mr. Dixon, a man who saved Jane’s life at Weymouth. Emma has imagined a triangular romance, in which Dixon, though engaged to Miss Campbell, is actually in love with the beautiful and talented Jane, who reciprocally falls in love with the man who saved her from drowning. On this view, Jane’s return to Highbury is not what it seems, as a base to seek a post as a governess, but rather a way to getting some distance from her triangulated relationship with the Dixons. Emma is so in love with this plot that, when Jane at the Bateses is the recipient of a piano bought in London from an unknown benefactor, she suggests to Frank Churchill that it must be a gift of love from Dixon.
One reason why Emma does not immediately guess that the piano is a gift from Frank Churchill – who has just returned from a quick excursion to London, ostensibly to have his hair cut – is that Emma has another imaginary plot going at the same time, one in which Frank Churchill falls in love with Emma. This plot is certainly less inventive than the other: for one thing, both Weston, Frank’s father, and Anne Taylor Weston, Emma’s former governess, already have hopes that something like this will happen. And for another, Frank plays along with these hopes because he has a plot of his own: his paying attention to Emma, flirting with and courting her, will give him further cover for coming often to Highbury to see Jane. But while Emma imagines that Frank is in love with her, she doesn’t imagine herself to be in love with him: she foresees a proposal of marriage, but one that she will decline.9 Nevertheless, she flirts publicly and outrageously with handsome Frank on all social occasions, entirely oblivious to the pain she is causing Jane. And she even more outrageously gossips with everyone hinting at Jane’s supposed relationship to Mr. Dixon, which is not merely harmless fun at another’s expense. If Jane is about to become a governess, as Emma supposes, nothing would destroy her employability faster than the circulation of rumors about an improper clandestine relationship with a man in the family with whom she was residing.
Meanwhile, the other unmarried residents of Highbury become involved in these complications in ways that also become clearer on a second reading. Harriet Smith tells Emma that she has become attracted to a gentleman who is “far above Mr. Elton” and to whom she feels a huge debt of gratitude. Emma assumes this must be Frank Churchill, who recently saved Harriet from a band of marauding gypsies who are camping nearby. In fact, George Knightley is the gentleman to whom Harriet is attracted: after seeing Harriet brutally snubbed by the Eltons at a local ball, Knightley restores her self‐respect by asking her to dance. Emma is unable to think of Knightley as a possible mate for Harriet, and in fact becomes deeply upset at the idea, suggested by Mrs. Weston, that he might marry Jane Fairfax – or indeed, anyone at all. Even on a first reading we may suspect from Emma’s intense adverse reaction to the idea, that it is not caused by what she mentions – her fear that her little nephew Henry will not become the heir to Knightley’s house and lands.
But it is not until Harriet puts an end to Emma’s confusion by telling her that it is Knightley for whom she cares that Emma realizes that “Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.” Emma backs into this realization, and in a way, so does Knightley: Knightley has loved Emma for so long that he takes her for granted, and it is only when he sees that his intensely hostile feelings about Frank Churchill are embittered by jealousy that he realizes that his feelings about Emma are not those for a mere sister‐in‐law. Even on a first reading, we may see this coming long before the characters do, and indeed part of our sense that Emma and Knightley will make a good married couple is that they already fit together like one, as we when watch them collaboratively calming their fretful or argumentative relatives, like her father and his brother.
It is the resolution of the first mystery – the secret engagement of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax – that allows all the other romantic plot lines to fall into place. Frank’s imperious aunt suddenly dies, his more malleable uncle has no objection to Frank’s attachment to Jane, and the revelation of Frank’s masquerade is one thing that helps Knightley and Emma understand themselves and each other. (And we meanwhile discover why Knightley has been paying attention to Harriet: Robert Martin has not moved on after her rejection of him, and Knightley is preparing the ground for a renewal of his proposal.) So the novel that started with one offstage wedding (Anna Taylor and Mr. Weston) and began its long second act with another (Augusta Hawkins and Mr. Elton), concludes with three marriages: Frank and Jane, Harriet and Robert Martin, and Knightley and Emma.
But it is unusual for Jane Austen to have the resolution of a novel depend on a single chance event like the sudden death of Mrs. Churchill, and Leland Monk has suggested,10 with tongue firmly in cheek, that there’s a case to be made that Frank must have poisoned his aunt, about whose death we are told that, thirty‐six hours after Frank’s return to their home, “a sudden seizure of a different nature from anything foreboded by her general state had carried her off after a short struggle.” We accept coincidences like this easily enough in Defoe and Fielding, and Monk’s essay testifies that we expect less dependence on chance events in Austen’s version of realistic plotting. In Austen we expect things to happen because of the way people behave, not because of chance events.
Not that Austen actually avoids coincidences in her plotting, but she does tend to hide them by embedding them deep in the fabric of her novels. For example, the plot of Pride and Prejudice depends for its smooth operation on Lizzie and Darcy getting together three times at three different locations, at Meryton (where the original “first impressions” are formed), at Rosings (where the disastrous first proposal takes place), and at Pemberley (where it becomes clear that Darcy has changed, has conquered his pride). The first meeting is a given of the story, but the other two require “small world” coincidences. The meeting at Rosings depends on the fact that Lizzie’s clergyman cousin, who marries her best friend Charlotte, is rector in the parish of Darcy’s aunt. The meeting at Pemberley depends on the coincidence that Mrs. Gardiner, Lizzie’s aunt by marriage, grew up in Lambton, a town in Derbyshire five miles from Pemberley, and Lambton becomes the destination to which she and Lizzie travel on their summer holiday. Austen defuses the surprise of the coincidences by embedding the key “small world” facts early in the novel and outside the relationship of Lizzie and Darcy: for example, Aunt Gardiner’s Derbyshire origin is first mentioned in connection with Lizzie’s brief flirtation with Wickham, whose late father had been estate manager at Pemberley. In this sense Austen generally hides her coincidences, so that her happy endings do not appear to depend on chance plot mechanisms.
The equivalent coincidence in Emma is the fact that Frank Churchill’s father and Jane Fairfax’s aunt and grandmother all reside in Highbury. (As mentioned in Chapter 5, Fielding exploits coincidences in exactly the opposite way: he flaunts coincidence in order to make his happy endings seem less probable and more providential.) The coincidental death of Mrs. Churchill is unique in the Austen canon in coming out of the blue at precisely the right time, right after Jane breaks her engagement to Frank but before she leaves to take up a post as governess in Bristol. We may or may not want to speculate, like Leland Monk, on whether her death was a matter of malice aforethought, but there is another sense in which Austen lets Frank get away with murder: he behaves with enormous irresponsibility throughout the novel, but is rewarded with a beautiful, talented, intelligent, and entirely worthy wife. In that sense Emma too gets away with murder.
We can get into the minds of fictional characters in a variety of ways. The mind of a character may be represented in psychonarration – a kind of summary of the character’s thoughts, but in the exterior narrator’s voice rather than the character’s; for example: “Then he rejoiced in his liberty.” Or the story may use quoted interior monologue (where the words are the character’s thoughts, in the first person): “Now I’m free!!” Or the story may use free indirect discourse, where we read the character’s own words but with the first‐person pronouns shifted into the third person and the present tense verbs shifted to the past tense, but with deictics remaining what they would be in interior monologue: “Now he was free!!”11
Free indirect discourse can be found occasionally in some very early texts – linguists have found versions of it in Chaucer and even in the Hebrew Bible – but its substantial use in literary fiction begins with Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796), and we see it all over the novels of Jane Austen. Austen in fact uses all three ways of representing consciousness in Emma and in her other novels, and she moves quickly and without warning from one to another as the demands of character development require. In the following passage from chapter 16, I have used three different type styles to represent the three ways in which the reader is allowed to read Emma’s mind:
This complex passage illustrates the two aspects of Emma’s character that combine to make her such a perfect heroine of a punitive comedy. On the one hand she recognizes how she misread Elton, and repents of the results of her matchmaking – she knows that Harriet will be hurt deeply when she finds out what Elton’s intentions were. But on the other hand she continues to insist that she was “quite right” to persuade Harriet to reject Robert Martin, and while she resolves, generally, to matchmake no more, she immediately falls back into the habit she has renounced, and resumes thinking about possible husbands for Harriet, like William Coxe (from a family that Emma elsewhere mentions as “very vulgar”. Emma’s snobbery about those not working in a gentlemanly milieu is still very much in evidence.)
The combination of sympathy and judgment with which we read the passage varies with the method of mind‐reading. In this passage, at least, Austen seems to use quoted interior monologue for the passages where she means us to be least sympathetic with and most judgmental of her heroine – the passages where Emma seems to return to her old desires to manipulate others – and uses free indirect discourse where she means us to be more sympathetic. In a way this may seem paradoxical since quoted interior monologue spoken in the first person would seem to be the deepest dive into a psyche. But perhaps it works exactly the other way, because speaking with first‐person pronouns is how others approach us. Emma’s “I” makes her an Other, while the sentences where she is a “she” (and where we work to translate the pronouns, the deictics, and the tenses) absorb us more seamlessly into the fabric of her meditation, make us more empathetic with her. Whether this is more generally true would be harder to say and perhaps impossible to prove.
A novel with a snob at its center is inevitably going to be about class, and we can learn a great deal about social structure in England by paying close attention to the distinctions that are made and ignored by the heroine and by other characters. But the first thing to notice is that Austen seems to ignore the class system that Marx saw operating in England and other advanced European countries in the nineteenth century: she doesn’t speak of an aristocracy, a bourgeoisie, and a proletariat. For her there are not three classes but two castes, those who belong to the gentry, and everybody else.
Gentlemen comprise landowners and rentiers and members of the genteel professions: barristers and judges, clergymen of all ranks from curate to archbishop, and officers in the army and the navy; gentlewomen are their wives and daughters. Emma has samples of all of these. George Knightley of Donwell Abbey is a landowner; he is a country squire par excellence, and his estate is the largest piece of land in the neighborhood. Emma’s father, Henry Woodhouse of Hartfield, is primarily a rentier; he has a country house and enough land attached to it to raise his own poultry and pigs, along with a garden and a lawn, but what he primarily has is money in safe investments that yield a good income: “The landed property of Hartfield certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged; but their fortune, from other sources, was such as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself, in every other kind of consequence; and the Woodhouses had long held a high place in the consideration of the neighbourhood.”
The Woodhouses may be “scarcely secondary” as Emma thinks, but rentiers are a step below country squires because their commitment to the location where they live is less certain. Mr. Knightley’s brother, John Knightley, is a barrister living in London, and we can tell he is a barrister because there are seasons – the courts’ sessions – when he cannot come to the country on account of the cases he has to argue. Philip Elton is the rector of Highbury, a gentleman by virtue of having taken orders as a clergyman but – as Emma is conscious – “without any alliances but in trade,” he is only barely a gentleman. And both Mr. Weston and Jane Fairfax’s father were officers in the army. Money has everything to do with the style of one’s living but nothing to do with gentility: Mrs. Bates and Miss Bates, as a clergyman’s widow and daughter, are genteel, and Emma pays calls upon them, despite the fact that they are so desperately poor that Knightley and Emma not only invite them to dinner but send them gifts of meat and produce as acts of charity.
Below the gentry are the undifferentiated common people. At the bottom of this caste are the poor, whom Emma does not treat as equals, but for whom she has deep concern despite her narcissism and her frequent airs of superiority. Here she calls upon a family visited by ill health as well as poverty:
Emma’s thorniest problem, and perhaps Austen’s as well, is the middle class, partly because its existence calls into doubt the dubious equation of birth and worth that underlies her world view. It is easiest to define it out of existence as a social object: as Emma says to Harriet in chapter I.4 – the topic is Harriet’s prosperous tenant farmer, Robert Martin – “The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in every other he is below it.”
Besides the yeomanry, the middle class comprises those professions that are not included in the sublime foursome of the army, the navy, the church, and the bar, along with those in commerce, or, as Austen usually puts it, trade. William Coxe, a young bachelor with a house full of sisters, is “a pert young lawyer” to Emma, a term she would not use about her barrister brother‐in‐law John Knightley, and it echoes the distinction observed to this day in the United Kingdom between solicitors, who do contracts, wills, and property transfers, and the bewigged barristers, who argue civil and criminal cases before judges. Another learned profession that had not yet become thought of as genteel was medicine, represented in Emma by the apothecary, Mr. Perry, on whom Mr. Woodhouse relies. The topic of the letter that reveals to the attentive reader the clandestine correspondence between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill is the question of whether Mr. Perry will “set up his carriage”; and the reason why that might be worth writing about is that carriages were for the gentry. Although making house calls in a carriage, rather than on horseback, may be more convenient for the aging medical practitioner, it also might signify to others that Perry aspires to be thought of as gentry, and Perry ultimately decides not to transgress this sumptuary rule.
Trade could be a topic on its own: it was certainly the primary source of the wealth of the United Kingdom at the time, but we meet few representatives actively engaged in trade in the Austen canon – one of the few is Elizabeth Bennet’s uncle Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice.12 But trade is often mentioned as the ultimate source of income of characters who have crossed the line into something like gentility, like Mr. Elton, or the Bingleys in Pride and Prejudice. In Emma, the wealthy tradespeople are the Coles, whose history, along with Emma’s attitude toward that history, appears in II.7:
There is a bit of shorthand here: the “house in town” is probably the Coles’s business, not their residence; “their house” in Highbury is clearly their country house, which they have turned into a gentleman’s residence.
And they have observed the rules of social climbing assiduously. They don’t pretend to be what they are not, and they first invite only single gentlemen to dine with them (like Mr. Elton before his marriage, or Mr. Knightley), since it is the ladies who are charged with enforcing the boundaries of good society. And in point of fact Emma is wrong in her prediction about the Coles’s planned dinner party, which is intended to launch them as within the gentlefolk of Highbury: Mr. Knightley and the Westons have indeed been invited and have already accepted. The only reason the Coles have delayed issuing an invitation to the Woodhouses is that they are waiting for a screen to arrive from London that will guarantee Emma’s father’s comfort. Emma’s snobbery is very much in evidence: she at first hopes to receive an invitation so that she can decline it with disdain, and is frustrated that day follows day and no invitation arrives. By the time it does, Emma has changed her mind, attends the party, enjoys herself, and when it is over has almost forgotten her hostile first thoughts about the Coles and their pretentions.
There are also those who don’t know the rules or don’t care: Mrs. Elton, formerly Augusta Hawkins of Bristol, 13 is from a family of tradespeople; a gentlewoman primarily by having married the rector of Highbury, she is constantly alluding to the wealth and the possessions of her sister and brother‐in‐law, the Sucklings of Maple Grove, insisting on her privilege as a bride to precede Emma and all the other ladies on their way in to dinner, and patronizing Jane Fairfax by officiously helping her find a place among her pseudo‐genteel acquaintances as governess.
So there are still two castes in Austen’s world, but their boundaries are permeable. That there can be downward as well as upward movement is shown in the history of Mr. Weston given at the beginning of chapter I.2. His origins are in Highbury, in a “respectable family, which for the last two or three generations, had been rising into gentility and property.” “Respectable” suggests middle‐class origins, but Weston does not initially engage in trade of any sort: instead he buys a commission in the army, which makes him by definition an officer and a gentleman. As Captain Weston he marries the Miss Churchill of Enscombe by whom he has Frank, who is at his wife’s death adopted by his brother‐ and sister‐in‐law. Impoverished by the expensive tastes of his late wife, Weston descends to engage in trade, helped by the fact that his Weston brothers are able to help him get a good start. He quickly makes enough money to retire, buy Randalls, “a little estate adjoining Highbury,” and marry the portionless Anna Taylor, Emma’s former governess. So Weston has been in the course of one life an officer (gentry), a tradesman (commoner), and a landowner (gentry), like Jane Austen’s favorite brother Henry, who became an army officer, then a London banker, and finally a clergyman.
The denouement, with its marriages, affirms Austen’s view of class. Harriet Smith, revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy tradesman (rather than of a nobleman, as Emma once imagined), will take her proper place in society among the Martins: “The intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner.” On the other side, the impoverished but worthy Jane will wear the family jewelry of the Churchills. And at Emma’s wedding, the parvenue Mrs. Elton will be excluded: Austen lets us know that her critique of the ceremony (“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! – Selina would stare when she heard of it.”) comes at second hand (“from the particulars detailed by her husband”), since Augusta was not invited.
As a novel about class, Emma also participates in the most important political question of its day, the one posed by the French Revolution of 1789 and not answered by the final battle of Waterloo in 1815. Coming from the most marginal class within the gentry, the group without land or great monetary wealth within the immediate family, Jane Austen’s vision of her society was, as one might expect, highly conservative, taking the side of Edmund Burke rather than the English Jacobins like Godwin and Wollstonecraft. And she was 19 when her fascinating cousin, Eliza Hancock, who had married Jean‐François, Comte de Feuillide, was widowed by the guillotine in 1794. Emma is not a typical anti‐Jacobin novel like those of the 1790s, which create characters and ideas representative of political thinkers like Paine, Godwin, or Rousseau in order to ridicule them.14 But it does have a very positive message about how England works in a typical village in the home counties. The key representative of government is Mr. Knightley, and he is not only named George, like three Hanoverian kings, the current Prince Regent, and the patron saint of England, but as Claire Lamont has pointed out he is frequently described in national terms. He greets his brother “in the true English style,” addresses Emma “in plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English,” and even criticizes Frank Churchill’s manners as lacking in “English delicacy.” Knightley is about as far as one can imagine from either the secretive, guilty Falkland of Caleb Williams or the credulous if charitable Allworthy of Tom Jones: he is the personification of honesty, candor, and good sense. Though his lands comprise much of the Highbury neighborhood, he rules his domain not as a despot but in consultation with all the other men of education and substance who can contribute to the resolution of issues: chapter III.16 refers to a “regular meeting” at the Crown Inn which Elton and Cole and Weston are expected to attend, together with Knightley, to discuss and decide local affairs.
One gets Austen’s vision in a nutshell in a brief passage during the episode when Emma and the other gentry are picking strawberries at Donwell Abbey around Midsummer Day. The guests arrive and, after the fatigues of picking fruit, refresh themselves by taking a short walk in the cool of the afternoon. Austen describes both the house and the grounds, focalized through Emma’s point of view:
Donwell Abbey, as Austen implies by the last sentence, is a personification of England, whose constitution, like the house itself, is not the product of a single architect following an a priori theory at one specific time, but something that developed gradually over many centuries, so naturally it is “rambling and irregular.” Unlike the Palace of Versailles it is not designed for show or to peer down upon the landscape, and its “abundance of timber” – timber that might be sold by extravagant owners in order to pay their debts – testifies to the prudent way the Knightleys, like England itself, have managed the estate.15
On the walk toward the river, a “low stone wall with high pillars” suggests that in an earlier generation there was a plan of “an approach to the house” that had greater grandeur, but this plan was apparently abandoned. Possibly Austen was thinking allegorically of earlier reigns with pretentions to divine right (or possibly the Catholic monasticism that England abandoned in the sixteenth century, which turned what had once been an actual abbey into the private property of the Knightleys). In any case, the view as the party approaches the river features, at the bottom of the “considerable slope,” Abbey Mill Farm, the prosperous holding rented from Knightley by Robert Martin. The relationship between Knightley and Martin, the relationship at its best of gentry and yeomanry in England, is represented within the description of the farm itself: the Mill Farm is lower down the slope but it is “favourably placed and sheltered,” and the river boundary “making a close and handsome curve around it” suggests the security of the embrace of his prosperous, rising workers by the landowner of true gentility and understanding.
In this sense Emma may be seen as the first “Condition‐of‐England” novel – the term was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the first chapter of Chartism (1840) – a novel exploring the classes and the masses, the landowners and factory owners and the workers they employ – and whether their relationship is healthy or diseased. Austen is not a Pollyanna: she understands that irresponsible owners and snobbish rentiers pose a threat to the proper order of things as great as the threat posed by improvident workers (or outlaw predators, like the gypsies). But in 1815, the year of Waterloo, she could present a prospect of England as a land prospering “under a sun bright without being oppressive.” We enjoy the moment, the cozy world she creates; as the nineteenth century went on, however, Austen’s optimism and her Burkean conservatism would come to seem less and less tenable, an ideology in the sense of false consciousness, to be corrected by later “Condition of England” novels. But that will be in a different age.