Being a Personal Reminiscence on What Emma Means to Me and How it Changed My Literary Life, in Half a Chapter.

When I was a smug seventeen I scowled somewhat arrogantly at my girlfriend that romance novels were all the same. You knew exactly what would happen. Two people would fall in love. The End. Perhaps this was in response to her peremptory dismissal of the great work of Weis and Hickman, the almighty Dragonlance chronicles that, in my mind, soared the heights of imaginative fiction. She'd constantly be challenging me to read what she called “better books” and I struggled my way through William Golding, Ken Kesey, J D Salinger and Aldous Huxley without feeling a damn thing for them. Truthfully I'm not sure that she liked these novels much either but there's a sense of obligation one feels to be able to appreciate the novels that litter your mother's or your girlfriend's mother's bookshelf. Her 6 shelves of books containing a few hundred books I'd never heard of were somewhat intimidating to me as a teenager but they did all look so boring with their faded dust jackets and tatty hardcovers and their appearance of having been bought in 1962 and never read. Still, K was supportive to an extent of her mother's literary endeavours and so promptly complained that of the several hundred books she owned – and presumably cherished – about 20 of them were written before 1920. Literature got better over time she said. We are living in a golden age, she said (meaning, 20 years previous). The booker prize, the nobel prize, her stodgy book club reads were all proof of that.

Well, K, being a dutiful daughter did what all dutiful daughters do and went on to read the precise opposite of what her mother suggested she should read (Jane Austen, of course). Me, being a dutiful boyfriend who wanted to get into his somewhat pretty girlfriend's pants, read the books he was told to read by said pretty girl, and then moaned incessantly about them afterwards (not a great seduction strategy, all things considered). “Romance novels were all the same”, I said, “You know exactly what's going to happen, there'll be a fight, then they'll fall in love” In stating this I merrily ignored two things 1. I'd never actually read any romance novels beyond perusing my mother's woefully inadequate bookshelves on a rainy Sunday afternoon, trying to figure out the appeal of Catherine Cookson and Jackie Collins. 2. Books have plots, schemas and conflicts and I'd quite happily read 15 Conan novels that were “all the same”. “Why don't you try reading Jane Austen's Emma?” she suggested with a knowing wink, knowing that I was making a supreme fool of myself and knowing that, as usual, she was frustratingly right. I agreed on account of the fact that it wasn't another weighty 1960s tome pretentiously claiming to have figured out the meaning of life, telling its tale through the affected voice of a pseudo-disenfranchised male whose penis was far larger than his brain (neither world-beaters). Of course, that's not how I put it at the time but I could emphatically state that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest bored me rigid. I likewise had no expectations regarding Emma, though I noted the distinct lack of penis. It would most likely be a chore since we'd studied Mansfield Park in school and that was a chore.

And thus my love of literature was born. Equally, my love of women's literature was born, as was my appreciation that disaffected female voices are far less pretentious and irritating than disaffected male ones. In the pages of Jane Austen's Emma I found a voice that for the first time in my life I could truly relate to. In hindsight this is a trifle odd since Austen wrote the novel in 1815 and I was a disaffected, slightly pretentious suburban working class male of the 1990s. Nevertheless I think that I fell in love with Emma after perusing the first chapter. Here was the portrait of a beautiful, vivacious and charming girl, exposed to the world warts and all, but vivacious and charming nevertheless. Emma, to be blunt, is an arrogant little bitch and even by the end of the novel she's an arrogant little bitch; probably a lot like the beautiful, brilliant, sarcastic woman who penned her. This wasn't a novel about men and women prancing about and falling in love (like that Pride and Prejudice TV adaptation I'd seen), this was an honest portrait of a girl written by an honest woman who wasn't afraid to expose her worst faults before her readers. I didn't, of course, tell my girlfriend that I'd fallen in love with Emma any more than I told her that she reminded me of Emma, but then I have an undying adoration for people who know their strengths and damn their weaknesses, who are smart, vivacious, witty and fearless. Jane Austen, of course, knew that she was a brilliant woman and her confidence as a writer and as a person drips through every page of Emma (as well as the rest of her work).

Sometimes reading a story is a story in itself, and reading Emma for the first time was the beginning of my story as an adult, and it opened up a world of classic literature to me from which I've never looked back. To this day I've barely read any more novels from pretentious, apparently disenfranchised middle-class modern males (of which I am one) because they seem to have so much less to say to me than the great authors of the 19th century. The personal bias is mine, of course. We choose our own hobbies and interests and I've drifted somewhat into cultivating a romantic imagination rather reminiscent of Anne Shirley, preferring historical backdrops, sardonic wit, flowery prose and big storylines to stay-at-home dramas and – to me – small minded concerns. Emma, of course, is a small minded story in many ways, about a well to do girl who loves to meddle and who falls in love when she realises that she's been too much of a stupid cunt (my language, not Austen's) to consider it, but it's also a story about how a certain type of person – whom I identify with – interacts with a community that she inherently doesn't identify with. And as should be plain through this review, I'm terrible at identifying with people in the wider community. It's a small minded story with big ideas.

Am I looking for books with insight or melodramatic plots, I often ask myself? Generally, I think both.

So, I thank my now ex-gf (who remained my girlfriend for an extraordinarily long time, being a remarkably patient as well as an adorably self-assuredly arrogant individual) for 1) allowing me into her pants and 2) insisting that, if 1 were to happen, I should at least do her the honour of broadening my literary horizons and to think outside the box of what different people of different genders are expected to read and to throw away my assumptions, my parents assumptions, her parents assumptions, about what makes a good novel or a good - or intelligent -person and sometimes to trust our instincts. Two people falling in love is not such a bad subject matter for a novel, not if it's written well, with a little wit, charm, honesty and just a dash of arrogance.