Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 24

Emma’s Accomplishments and Mrs. Elton’s Resources

Kim Wilson is a writer, speaker, editor, tea lover, and gardening enthusiast, and a life member of JASNA. She’s the award-winning author of At Home with Jane Austen, Tea with Jane Austen, and In the Garden with Jane Austen. She lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and often travels to speak about Jane Austen and her world. This year, she’ll be giving lectures for a Jane Austen series hosted by the Road Scholar organization. Beginning next year, she’ll be the Regional Coordinator for JASNA Wisconsin. Her website is KimWilsonAuthor.com, and she’s on Twitter (@KimWilsonAuthor). At Home with Jane Austen, “an enchanting biographical sketch” (Library Journal), was named the #1 Non-Fiction Austen-Inspired Title of 2014 by Austenprose.

Kim tells me that while she was born in Seattle, which has a climate similar to England’s, she loves living in Wisconsin and has “even learned to love the snow and winters” in her adopted home state. I had a feeling that she’d have some lovely garden photos to share with us for Emma in the Snow, and I was right. Here’s a snowdrop photo from last week, plus a glimpse of what her garden will look like in April. I’m very happy to introduce her guest post on accomplishments in Emma.

Daffodils, scilla, and bloodroot in Kim’s garden last April

Jane Austen’s novels are filled with “accomplished” young women. The Miss Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility are (according to the Miss Steeles) “beautiful, elegant, accomplished, and agreeable”; the Miss Musgroves in Persuasion have “all the usual stock of accomplishments”; in Mansfield Park, Julia Bertram is “a nice, handsome, good‑humoured, accomplished girl”; and in Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana Darcy is (according to her housekeeper) “the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so accomplished!” and Anne de Bourgh is (according to Mr. Collins) prevented only by her sickly constitution from being very accomplished indeed. In Emma, Austen crafts three young women, Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, and Augusta Elton, as foils to Emma Woodhouse, their accomplishments, or lack thereof, highlighting Emma’s own talents and flaws.

What constituted an “accomplished” woman in Jane Austen’s day? In Pride and Prejudice, Bingley supposes that skill in traditional female handicrafts suffices and that all young ladies are therefore accomplished: “They all paint tables, cover skreens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished.” Certainly many of the women in the novels are accomplished in this sense: Elinor Dashwood paints screens, Georgiana Darcy designs tables, and Elizabeth Bennet, Mrs. Grant, and Lady Bertram all embroider (as did Jane Austen herself). But Miss Bingley stipulates for more: “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … and … a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.” And Darcy, famously, insists that “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Here we come closer to Emma’s own accomplishments. She plays the pianoforte, sings, draws, dances, occasionally begins, at least, what Mr. Knightley calls a “course of steady reading,” and is a remarkably elegant young woman.

The problem, of course, is that Emma, “the cleverest of her family,” is a classic underachiever, a trait sometimes seen in gifted and talented people. Her superior natural talents bring her a “reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved,” but because “she will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience,” she does not come close to “the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of.” Poor Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice works long and assiduously, proud to be known as “the most accomplished girl in the neighbourhood,” but there is no helping her inherent lack of taste and style; Emma garners praise that she knows she does not deserve without even trying.

“Harmony Before Matrimony,” by James Gillray, 1805 (Library of Congress)

“Matrimonal Harmonics,” by James Gillray, 1805 (Library of Congress)

In Jane Austen’s time, a young woman was expected to apply herself to the acquisition of accomplishments because they enhanced her chances that she would marry well. “Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world,” says Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, “and ten to one but she has the means of settling well.” Beauty, accomplishments, and money were a surefire combination. In the same novel, Mrs. Grant expects that her sister, Mary Crawford, will marry well: “The eldest son of a Baronet was not too good for a girl of twenty thousand pounds, with all [her] elegance and accomplishments.” Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” can expect the same if she desires it.

Musical accomplishments were especially valued because a young woman, at home or visiting, could provide entertainment for her family and friends and display her charms at the same time. She might sing or play an instrument such as the harp, as Mary Crawford does in Mansfield Park, or the pianoforte, as Elizabeth Bennet does in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen sang and played the pianoforte herself, but only performed for family. She did enjoy listening to such performances, however: “Miss H. is an elegant, pleasing, pretty looking girl … with flowers in her head, & Music at her fingers ends.—She plays very well indeed. I have seldom heard anybody with more pleasure” (Letters, 29 May 1811). In Emma, both Miss Fairfax and Emma play the pianoforte and sing for their friends’ entertainment, much to Mr. Knightley’s enjoyment: “I do not know a more luxurious state, sir,” he tells Mr. Woodhouse, “than sitting at one’s ease to be entertained a whole evening by two such young women; sometimes with music and sometimes with conversation.”

In Emma, Jane Fairfax stands as the model for the truly accomplished young woman. Trained to be a governess, she has applied herself where Emma will not, and is, as Isabella Knightley calls her, “very accomplished and superior.” Emma has never made a friend of Jane Fairfax, and though she acknowledges her to be “one of the most lovely and accomplished young women in England,” in fact she is “sick of the very name of Jane Fairfax,” echoing Jane Austen’s own feelings about perfect heroines: “pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked” (Letters, 23 March 1817). Emma does not admit to herself why she does not like this paragon of virtues, but Mr. Knightley knows it is “because she saw in her the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself.”

A detail from “Sweet Lullaby,” by Thomas Rowlandson, 1803 (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

Harriet Smith, by contrast, is remarkably lacking in accomplishments. She is a goodhearted goose of a girl, but her education at Mrs. Goddard’s school in Highbury was simply inadequate, as Mr. Knightley tells Emma: “She is not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information. She has been taught nothing useful, and is too young and too simple to have acquired any thing herself. … She is pretty, and she is good tempered, and that is all.” We hear of none of the usual accomplishments of young ladies; it appears that Harriet does not play the pianoforte well, does not sing or draw, and heaven knows she doesn’t read extensively. She has no doubt, though, been taught to sew and embroider nicely, creating the sort of “fancy work” that Mrs. Goddard has hanging in her parlor. Harriet provides Emma with a useful contrast—she is the unaccomplished friend who stands next to Emma to make her look good. In fact, her inferiority may fuel Emma’s self-complacency, Mr. Knightley warns Mrs. Weston: “Her ignorance is hourly flattery. How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?”

In Augusta Elton, the Reverend Mr. Elton’s new bride, Jane Austen provides a representation of a sort of pseudo-accomplished woman. Mrs. Elton combines stunning vulgarity with a self-satisfied pretension that is based on nothing in particular. “Self‑important, presuming, familiar, ignorant, and ill‑bred,” with only “a little beauty and a little accomplishment,” Mrs. Elton has “so little judgment” that she thinks she is “coming with superior knowledge of the world, to enliven and improve a country neighbourhood.” Highbury society, to Emma’s chagrin, takes Mrs. Elton—the former Miss Hawkins—at face value: “A week had not passed since Miss Hawkins’s name was first mentioned in Highbury, before she was, by some means or other, discovered to have every recommendation of person and mind; to be handsome, elegant, highly accomplished, and perfectly amiable: and when Mr. Elton himself arrived to triumph in his happy prospects, and circulate the fame of her merits, there was very little more for him to do, than to tell her Christian name, and say whose music she principally played.”

“The Accomplish’d Maid,” by M. Darly, 1778 (Library of Congress)

Music, Mrs. Elton claims, is one of her chief “resources,” or accomplishments and personal qualities, that will enable her to endure the quiet village life of Highbury: “I absolutely cannot do without music. It is a necessary of life to me; and having always been used to a very musical society, both at Maple Grove and in Bath, it would have been a most serious sacrifice…. I honestly said that the world I could give up—parties, balls, plays—for I had no fear of retirement. Blessed with so many resources within myself, the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it. To those who had no resources it was a different thing; but my resources made me quite independent.” She never stays home long enough, though, for her resources to be tested: “From Monday next to Saturday, I assure you we have not a disengaged day!—A woman with fewer resources than I have, need not have been at a loss.” Yet in spite of being “doatingly fond of music—passionately fond,” Mrs. Elton, having married, seems to feel that the days of needing accomplishments for display are over: “For married women, you know,” she tells Emma, “there is a sad story against them, in general. They are but too apt to give up music.” She cites the example of her sister, three friends, and other women, “more than [she] can enumerate,” who have all given up playing music after marriage. Emma, “finding her so determined upon neglecting her music, had nothing more to say.”

With three such contrasts, it is no wonder that we appreciate Jane Austen’s depiction of Emma as an accomplished but nevertheless realistically flawed young woman, loved by Mr. Knightley as the “sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults.”

A final note: Among the many opinions of Emma collected by Jane Austen is that of Mrs. Cage, who wrote, “Miss Bates is incomparable, but I was nearly killed with those precious treasures!” For my part, I am nearly killed by Mrs. Elton’s resources. I treasure the little throwaway line when the Eltons’ horse is lamed and the party of pleasure must be postponed: “Mrs. Elton’s resources were inadequate to such an attack.”

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R.W. Chapman (1934) and from the fourth edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 2011). (The Library of Congress and the Lewis Walpole Library place no restrictions on the use of their out-of-copyright images.)

Twenty-fifth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: the last post, entitled “Frank Churchill Gets a Haircut,” by Paul Savidge.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss the rest of this party for Emma! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).

Emma the Imaginist

Deborah Yaffe is the author of Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom (2013). She’s an award-winning newspaper journalist and author and she’s been a passionate Jane Austen fan since first reading Pride and Prejudice at age ten. She has a bachelor’s degree in humanities from Yale University and a master’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship. She works as a freelance writer and lives in central New Jersey with her husband, her two children, and her Jane Austen action figure.

Deborah writes about Austen on her blog, and a couple of years ago I interviewed her about her blog series “The Watsons in Winter.” When I hosted a celebration in honour of Mansfield Park, she wrote a guest post called “The Fatal Mistake.”

For Emma in the Snow, she asked her daughter, Rachel Yaffe-Bellany, to take this photo of snow in New Jersey after last week’s snowfall. I’m delighted to introduce Deborah’s guest post on “Emma the Imaginist.”

Deborah says this is “The Last Gasp of Winter (or so we hope, at least).” (I’m hoping the snow that’s falling this morning is the last gasp of winter in Nova Scotia as well.)

Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made.

(Volume 3, Chapter 3, from the Norton Critical Edition of Emma, edited by George Justice [2012])

From David Copperfield and Jo March to T.S. Garp and Harriet the Spy, fiction is filled with writer-characters, semi-autobiographical outgrowths of their creators’ self-perceptions. At first blush, however, Jane Austen doesn’t seem to fit this pattern: Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film of Mansfield Park may transform Fanny Price into a stand-in for the scribbling young Austen, exhorting her younger sister, “Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint!” but Austen herself created no writer-characters.

Except, perhaps, for Emma Woodhouse.

Emma is in love with narrative.  In the novel’s very first scene, we find her telling her anxious father a comforting bedtime story about their future visits to Randalls—down to the stabling for the horses and the reactions of coachman James. Most of the stories Emma tells, however, are of a different, very specific kind: they are courtship stories, whether about the Westons’ marriage and her own (possibly exaggerated) role in furthering it, or about Jane Fairfax’s illicit Dixon romance, or, as in the passage above, about Frank and Harriet’s future together. Inside her own head, Emma is a would-be Jane Austen, obsessed with the marriage plot. So strong is her narrative impulse that she experiences people she doesn’t yet know as mental creations of her own—“according to my idea of Mrs. Churchill … ” (Volume 1, Chapter 14); “My idea of [Frank] is … ” (Volume 1, Chapter 18)—and flattens those she does know into recognizable dramatic types (“a fine young man and a lovely young woman”).

More dangerously, of course, Emma moves from narration to creation—from telling stories about others’ lives to attempting to mold reality into the narrative shape she has chosen. And the deeper she gets into this effort—re-forming the malleable Harriet into a more polished version of ladyhood, scotching Robert Martin’s proposal, promoting the match with Mr. Elton—the harder it becomes for her to experience these people as separate beings with their own inner lives, rather than as the characters she has created. “Mr. Elton was proving himself, in many respects, the very reverse of what she had meant and believed him,” Emma thinks in mortified vexation, as if her own beliefs and intentions about his personality should somehow have compelled his conformity. She reassures herself with the “great consolation … that Harriet’s nature should not be of that superior sort in which the feelings are most acute and retentive”—and then is startled to find that, in fact, it takes months for Harriet to recover from her heartbreak (Volume 1, Chapter 16). She is even surprised to discover that Harriet’s rejection has wounded the Martins—so surprised that she must quickly tell herself a new, self-exculpatory story about their motivations (“Ambition, as well as love, had probably been mortified” [Volume 2, Chapter 3]).

In fact, although Emma thinks of herself as “an imaginist,” her imaginative repertoire is fatally impoverished, for she is unable to imagine the feelings of other people. Like her father, who assumes that everyone must feel as he does, and therefore prefer gruel and quiet to cake and company, Emma makes herself the measure of all things. The humbling journey on which Jane Austen takes her is an education not only in her own feelings for Mr. Knightley but also in the irreducibly separate reality of other people’s experience, and the respect that this irreducible separateness demands. Essentially, this is what Mr. Knightley calls to her attention in the scolding he administers after the Box Hill picnic: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, must think herself into the life of a woman who is none of those things, and behave accordingly. Only in the final chapters of the novel, when Emma schools herself to endure suffering out of “a strong sense of justice by Harriet” (Volume 3, Chapter 11) and an unselfish desire to help Mr. Knightley (“Emma could not bear to give him pain” [Volume 3, Chapter 13]) does she fully imagine the feelings of others and resolve to put them ahead of her own.

Along the way, Emma—and by extension, we, the readers—also get a quiet education in storytelling. For Emma, the drama of courtship grows, ideally, out of melodrama: she is captivated by Jane Fairfax’s rescue from near-drowning and Harriet’s disturbing encounter with the gypsies. Even for the Westons’ uneventful middle-aged romance, Emma proposes a semi-dramatic starting-point: the protagonists’ chance encounter during a convenient rainstorm. No wonder she assumes Harriet must have fallen for the man who rescued her from the gypsies. Such an adventure! So peculiarly interesting! It turns out, however, that for Harriet, the adventure lies somewhere else entirely—in the “much more precious circumstance” (Volume 3, Chapter 11) of dancing with Mr. Knightley after the Eltons’ snub. True drama, Emma learns from Harriet, lies not in the extraordinary but in the everyday. And, of course, this is the great truth that all Austen’s work teaches us, and that is lost on critics who berate her for leaving out the Corn Laws and the Napoleonic Wars: the small tragedies and accomplishments of private life matter as much as the great dramas of war and politics. Emma, the would-be courtship novelist, must learn to appreciate the dramatic substance of her own unremarkable life.

But if Emma is Austen’s only writer-character, she is a strange version of the type, for she never writes a line. Her stories remain locked inside her imaginist’s mind, or, at most, imperfectly realized in the world around her. She is less a writer than a writer manqué, her creative impulses left unexpressed, thwarted by her own limitations and by the messiness of real life. Will the adventure of marriage and child-rearing provide the creative outlet she needs—an outlet that, we Austen readers cannot help noticing, Emma’s creator found wholly inadequate for her own creative impulses? In the final line of the novel, Austen assures us of Emma’s future “perfect happiness” (Volume 3, Chapter 19), but it’s hard not to imagine a very different outcome.

Twenty-fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Kim Wilson and Paul Savidge.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

My Heart Belongs to Mr. Knightley

Sarah Woodberry is a writer, editor, and creative writing instructor who loves to reread Jane Austen. She’s a member of JASNA’s New York Metropolitan Region and she teaches at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She says while she subscribes to the theory that “whichever Austen novel one is reading is the favorite,” she has a soft spot for Emma: “Every time I read the final line, I want to flip back to page one and start Emma again.” She first read the novel as a teenager and she’s reread it many times since then because she finds it “the sunniest and happiest” of Austen’s novels. It’s the book she turns to—and recommends to friends—“in tough or stressful times.”

Sarah wrote a guest post called “Worn Out with Civility at Mansfield Park” for my Mansfield Park series, and she wrote about Mr. Knightley in today’s guest post for Emma in the Snow. She blogs about reading and writing at Word Hits and you can find her on Twitter as well: @WordHits. It’s a pleasure to introduce her post on why Mr. Knightley is her favourite Austen hero.

Sarah’s photo of snowdrops in the snow

I don’t have an “I Heart Darcy” t-shirt. To be sure, when reading Pride and Prejudice, one cannot help but be enamored of Mr. Darcy. But really, when it comes to Jane Austen’s heroes, my heart belongs to Mr. George Knightley. He has all the advantages of Darcy—land, position, looks—but “with a real liberality of mind” (Volume 1, Chapter 18).

Despite his status as the most prominent landowner around, Mr. Knightley is not a snob. He has “a delicacy towards the feelings of other people” (Volume 1, Chapter 18). He shows attention to those less fortunate, like the Bateses and the orphaned Jane Fairfax. He’s happy to visit the “only moderately genteel” Coles (Volume 2, Chapter 7). When Harriet Smith is snubbed so publicly by Mr. Elton at the ball, Mr. Knightley makes a point of leading her onto the floor. Emma calls him “benevolent” (Volume 2, Chapter 8), and Harriet notices his “noble benevolence” (Volume 3, Chapter 11).

That’s not to imply that he has no backbone. As he says to Emma, a man can always do “his duty; not by maneuvering and finessing, but by vigor and resolution” (Volume 1, Chapter 18). Mr. Knightley politely checks the rather pushy Mrs. Elton, saying, “there is only one married woman whom I can ever allow to invite what guests she pleases to Donwell” (Volume 3, Chapter 6). While everyone at the Christmas party is debating the snowfall, Mr. Knightley walks down the road to examine its depth before sounding the all clear. When Hartfield does get snowbound, their only visitor is Mr. Knightley, “whom no weather could keep entirely from them” (Volume 1, Chapter 16).

While Austen doesn’t really describe Mr. Knightley’s appearance, his attractiveness is implied. Emma tells Harriet “you might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley” (Volume 1, Chapter 4). After meeting him, Mrs. Elton positively gushes about “Knightley,” and, after one dance, Harriet becomes smitten. At that ball, Emma begins to notice him herself. “His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders … was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes … there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him” (Volume 3, Chapter 2).

Still, what is most endearing about Mr. Knightley is his relationship with Emma. As the novel opens, we learn that “[they] always say what [they] like to one another” and have a teasing rapport. “You made a lucky guess,” he says when she boasts of matchmaking. “Have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess?” she retorts (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Emma jokes that his walking everywhere, instead of taking a carriage, “is a sort of bravado, an air of unaffected concern.” He replies, “‘Nonsensical girl!’ … but not at all in anger” (Volume 2, Chapter 8).

Their unique situation, in which Emma’s father expects Mr. Knightley daily, allows them to spend an unusual amount of time together. They are often alone—something that was prohibited of a suitor in those days. With the exception of Fanny Price, who lives in the same house as her cousin Edmund, Austen’s other heroines see their men at balls or chaperoned social calls, with limited one-on-one time. Emma and Mr. Knightley thus know each other better than most couples would. When Emma tells him that Harriet declined Robert Martin’s offer of marriage, Mr. Knightley instantly knows that Emma wrote the letter herself. When Mrs. Weston suspects that Mr. Knightley sent Jane the piano, Emma counters, “Mr. Knightley does nothing mysteriously … if he intended to give her one, he would have told her so” (Volume 2, Chapter 8). A little later, he says nearly the exact same words himself.

When he tells Emma that he loves her, he also feels that she “knows” him and “understands” him (Volume 3, Chapter 13). That’s what is so truly wonderful about their relationship—their connection. “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.—Mr. Knightley could not impute to Emma a more relenting heart than she possessed, or a heart more disposed to accept of his” (Volume 3, Chapter 13). Likewise, Mr. Knightley knows Emma. He’s seen her make big mistakes, such as ridiculing Miss Bates. But, in the end, he finds her “faultless in spite of all her faults” (Volume 3, Chapter 13).

Now I must address the age issue, as so many readers balk at that. (There was a good deal of discussion about this topic in the comments on Kirk Companion’s guest post “Why do readers object to the romance between Emma and Mr. Knightley?”) Yes, Emma is 21 and Mr. Knightley is 37; however, in Regency society this was par for the course. Emma argues that Robert Martin, at 24, is too young to marry. The main objection to the potential romance between Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax, also 21, is her lack of money and social status. Mrs. Weston comments, “Excepting inequality of fortune, and perhaps a little disparity of age, I can see nothing unsuitable” (Volume 2, Chapter 8). In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood is only 16 when she marries the 35-year-old Colonel Brandon. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia Bennet is “out” at age 15, meaning that she is on the marriage market. When she runs off with Wickham their elopement is decried because it is scandalous—not because he is about 28. In fact, Mrs. Bennet boasts that Lydia has married so early. Elizabeth Bennet will not admit to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that she is already 20. Both Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey are 17. It must be noted that at 21 Emma is older than every one of Austen’s leading ladies, except Anne Elliot (whose older age is a plot point). Throughout Emma, Austen describes Mr. Knightley in youthful and vibrant terms.

As to the much debated moment when Mr. Knightley tells Emma he’s loved her since she was 13 … he is joking! Out of context, and by contemporary standards, this sounds rather creepy, but it’s actually another example of their playful banter. They are talking of how indulged Mrs. Weston’s baby girl will be, and Mr. Knightley jests that he’s “losing all [his] bitterness against spoilt children” now that he has found happiness with Emma. Indeed, he feels he has been too nitpicky with her: “by dint of fancying so many errors, [I’ve] been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least.” He’s being facetious. He means that he somehow fell in love with her despite pointing out all her cheeky behavior. In reply, Emma says it would be the “greatest humanity” for Knightley to guide baby Anna—except, she quips, for falling in love with her at 13 (Volume 3, Chapter 17). Would Emma joke in this way or urge him to pay attention to little Anna if she thought Mr. Knightley serious? After all, she banished Harriet for having a crush on him.

Austen makes it clear that Mr. Knightley did not think of Emma romantically until she showed an interest in Frank Churchill. “He had been in love with Emma, and jealous of Frank Churchill, from about the same period, one sentiment having probably enlightened him as to the other” (Volume 3, Chapter 13).

The episode serves as a glimpse into their continued playfulness. Austen’s other novels basically end after the proposal, but in Emma we see the betrothed as couple. They tag-team in announcing their engagement to her reluctant father: Emma breaks the news and Mr. Knightley then joins them. When he offers to move into Hartfield, he asks Emma to think on it—and they make this decision together. This move is a huge concession from Mr. Knightley. “How few of those men in a rank of life to address Emma would have renounced their own home for Hartfield” (Volume 3, Chapter 17). Finally, when discussing Frank Churchill’s shameful treatment of Jane Fairfax, Mr. Knightley observes: “my Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?” (Volume 3, Chapter 15)

Mr. Knightley “is not a gallant man,” says Emma (Volume 2, Chapter 8). He does not carry her through a rainstorm, or rescue her sister from ruin, or return victorious from sea. Still, Austen, who loved wordplay, named him “Knight-ley.” His is a sort of quiet heroism. Just as Emma is able to see this in him, by proxy so do I. Perhaps because she knows him so intimately, I also feel a special connection. To me, Mr. Knightley has all the recommendations of a true Austen hero … and just a little bit more.

Quotations are from the Penguin Classics Edition of Emma, edited by Fiona Stafford (2003).

Twenty-third in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Deborah Yaffe, Kim Wilson, and Paul Savidge.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

The Best Fruit in England

Carol Chernega worked in the garden at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton in the summer of 2005 when she was chosen as the first International Visitor for JASNA. (Read more about the International Visitor Program here.) She’s continued the association she began that summer by collaborating with the House gardener, Celia Simpson, on an upcoming book, The Garden at Jane Austen’s House: Past and Present. Carol is past President of the Pittsburgh Region of JASNA, and she spoke at the 2008 JASNA AGM in Chicago about her experience as the International Visitor. 

I’m very pleased to introduce her guest post for Emma in the Snow on the strawberries at Donwell Abbey, and to share with you her photos of Jane Austen’s House and of Pittsburgh in the snow. I don’t have any new photos of Halifax in the snow, because we’ve had some mild weather recently and the snow has pretty much disappeared. But the forecast for tomorrow tells me there’s more on the way, so perhaps I’ll have some new photos to share with you next week.

Carol and I couldn’t find any recent pictures of strawberries or strawberry picnics, but I managed to find a photo of strawberries from a few years ago, so I’ll include it below. If any of you have hosted or attended Austen-inspired strawberry picnics, we’d be glad to hear about them.

The whole party were assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of.—“The best fruit in England—every body’s favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

Such, for half an hour, was the conversation—interrupted only once by Mrs. Weston, who came out, in her solicitude after her son-in-law, to inquire if he were come—and she was a little uneasy.—She had some fears of his horse.

Volume 3, Chapter 6 (Mollands.net)

One of the most popular scenes in Emma is the outing at Donwell Abbey. JASNA members frequently host strawberry picnics in June in tribute to this scene. We love to laugh at Mrs. Elton as she drones on about strawberries and gives her opinion on the attributes of different varieties.

But is this scene really a monologue by Mrs. Elton? And what’s so great about “hautboy”?

On the surface, it looks as though it is Mrs. Elton who is droning on about the various types of strawberries. She tries to present herself as an expert, but we know her for the pretentious bore that she is. We know Emma and Mr. Knightley don’t like her, so we’re predisposed to dislike her too. We’ve all probably met a Mrs. Elton, somebody who ostentatiously expounds on a subject, so we’re ready to laugh at her.

But is it really only Mrs. Elton talking? In the next paragraph, Austen refers to this as a conversation, not a monologue, and states it covers a period of half an hour. I’d suggest that the dashes used as punctuation are the points at which others try to enter the conversation. Perhaps people even contradict her statements. But she overcomes their objections every time. You can almost hear the other dialogue in those dashes. Somebody might say: “Oh, strawberries are much better than cherries.” Mrs. Elton shoots back: “Inferior to cherries.”

We’re only hearing Mrs. Elton’s side of the conversation, but it isn’t strictly a monologue. Presenting it as a monologue is, perhaps, Austen’s way of emphasizing the point that Mrs. Elton is trying to establish herself as the hostess. She doesn’t realize that the role of a good hostess is to place the spotlight on her guests, not to shine it on herself. She’ll never make it in Highbury society.

Now let’s talk of strawberries. Today, strawberry jam is the quintessential jam served with any self-respecting cream tea in England. However, during Austen’s time, strawberries would not have been used only as a food source. An infusion of fresh strawberry leaves would be used as a gargle for a sore throat. People were also advised to drink large quantities of this infusion for urinary problems.

When Jane Austen was a child, there were two native strawberries available in England. White wood was a small white strawberry, probably Fragaria vesca semperflorens. We now call this an alpine strawberry. The other was hautboy, Fragaria moschata, also known as hautbois or a musk strawberry.

In the late 18th century, a revolution in strawberries took place in Europe. By chance, two strawberries were crossed and produced a larger, tastier strawberry which is the ancestor of all English varieties known today. One of those crossed strawberries, Fragaria Virginiana, came from the Colonies and contributed the red color. The other, Fragaria Chileonsis, came from Chile and contributed the larger size. Its name was shortened to Chili. The new strawberry was called Fragaria X ananassa.

By the time Austen wrote Emma, she was obviously aware of these new, more flavorful strawberries coming in from Europe, and she used them to comic effect during the strawberry picking scene. The assertion that hautboy was scarce was probably true, and that’s due to the fact that hautboy has separate male and female plants and is therefore more challenging to cross-pollinate.

Although the statement is made that white wood was the finest flavored, today we’d probably find it bland. But in Austen’s time, it’s not surprising that the general feeling would be that the native strawberries, white wood and hautbois, would be considered the best.

The next time you host a strawberry picnic in Emma’s honor, see if you can find the strawberry varieties mentioned in the strawberry gathering scene. Compare them and decide which ones are superior. But do be sure to respect the opinion of your guests.

Twenty-second in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Sarah Woodberry, Deborah Yaffe, and Kim Wilson.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Jane Austen and her Emma in Spanish

Cinthia Garcia Soria is a freelance translator (from English to Spanish) and she’s working towards a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics in Translation Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . Her research focuses on the translation of irony in three novels by Jane Austen. She’s a long-time Janeite and in 1999 she co-founded JAcastellano , a Jane Austen group for Spanish speakers. Here’s the link to the Yahoo Group. JAcastellano is also on Facebook and Twitter (@JAcastellano).

Last month, Gillian Dow talked about the first French translation of Emma in her guest post for Emma in the Snow; today I’m pleased to introduce Cinthia’s guest post on Spanish translations of Austen’s novels, particularly of Emma.

She’s also sent a photo of two snow-covered volcanoes near Mexico City, where she lives. Here’s her description of them: “ The one in the left is the Iztaccihuatl (Nahuatl, from ‘White Woman,’ also called the ‘Sleeping Woman’ because of the shape it has, and because it’s considered a dormant volcano). On the right side is Popocatepetl (also Nahuatl, from ‘Smoking Mountain,’ and yes, it is an active volcano). The legend is that Iztaccihuatl was an Aztec princess who fell in love with one of her father’s warriors, Popocatepetl, and he was sent to war with the promise that on his return he could marry her. She was told he had fallen in battle, and the news caused her to die of grief. It was a lie—when he returned and found out he took her to the valley and stood beside her watching in eternity over her. The gods turned them into ‘mountains.’”

Jane Austen was almost unknown for most of the twentieth century in my part of the world. Those of us who discovered her before the big boom of adaptations in the mid-1990’s certainly struggled to find copies of her works in our language and only a few of us were adventurous enough to read her in English.

It was a little more than a century after Austen’s death that three of her novels were first translated into Spanish: Persuasion in 1919, followed by Northanger Abbey in 1921 and then Pride and Prejudice in 1924, issued by Calpe—later known as Espasa-Calpe. Twenty years later, in the wake of the interest created by the 1940 Pride and Prejudice film, more editions of that novel appeared and also the other three novels were at last translated into Spanish: Sense and Sensibility (which has been given at least five different titles in Spanish) in 1942, Mansfield Park in 1943 (with Chapters 11 through 20 omitted in that first translation), and Emma in 1945 (translated by Jaime Bofill y Ferro, in an edition published by M. Arimany). Yet for most of the 20th century, Jane Austen was almost unknown in the Spanish-speaking world, because only editions of the first three translated novels remained available.

Things changed in those last five years of the past century, as they did almost everywhere else, and since then, we have tried to catch up. Of course Pride and Prejudice has remained popular. But the other novels became available again by the end of the last century, and even some of minor works were also at last translated. Then, in 2012, all the letters were translated. This edition of the Cartas (Letters) of Jane Austen, published by D’Época Editorial, is a real highlight, because no other Spanish translation of Austen’s writing has reached its level of quality.

Although there are still Spanish-speaking countries and places where it isn’t possible to find translations of Austen’s novels, the number of editions in Spanish can easily reach two hundred. (Over 50% of these are translations of Pride and Prejudice.) Frankly, the problem Spanish-speaking Janeites face now is not the quantity but the quality of the translations and editions (and I admit we can be very fastidious readers).

Although the original English text of the works of Jane Austen has long been in the public domain, some people think, mistakenly, that Spanish translations are also free of copyright, but that is not so, since not even a century has passed since most of the translations were first published.

In addition, a single translation can be used for different editions, printed either by the same publishing house, or by a different publishing house. Sometimes the translator is not identified, and only when you compare texts can you discover who it was. There are translations credited to different individuals—yet some of these do seem to have been based on previous translations instead of the source text. Some translations are still credited to the first translator, even though someone else has since modernized the text (and such modernizations don’t always improve the translation). Some apparently new translations are identical—character by character and dot by dot—to a previous one. Or the syntax has been rearranged in order to conceal that the translation is based on a previous one. The number of translations is thus significantly lower in comparison with the number of editions.

It is difficult to answer which is the best translation as many factors are involved. There is no perfect translation of any author or any work. Inevitably, something is lost in translation, and even the most accomplished translator slips once in a while. To this we can add that Jane Austen is not easy to translate, partly because of her wit and irony, but also because of the differences between cultures and the 200-year gap between her time and our own.

For some of us, the many reference books published in English about Jane Austen’s life and times help to provide some context for her writing, but unfortunately none of them has been translated into Spanish. Introductions to the novels might help, but not many editions include one, and sometimes only a brief general biographical notice of the author is included. In the case of Emma, at least three of its translators have written introductions to the novel, but, unfortunately, two of these include big plot spoilers.

If Jane Austen’s contemporary readers—Maria Edgeworth included—found it difficult to understand Emma, it is not surprising people abroad nowadays may similarly dislike the novel because they think nothing happens in it. No aid is provided for readers to understand what is going on below the surface in the many editions and translations of the novel.

I could enter into details about other problems that could be found in the translations into Spanish, but for now I’ll just say that up to now it appears there are at least eleven translators of Emma into Spanish; however, only around six of them seem to have worked from the original text, some more successfully than others. Their translations continue to be in use, in some cases forty years (or more) after they first appeared in print.

One element of modern translations I dislike is the trend towards translations adapted for the reader’s environment, instead of translations that help readers to understand the world depicted in the original text. For example, English units are sometimes changed to their equivalents in the decimal measurement system, which is, I think, a controversial decision. It does not augur well for future translations or editions.

I wonder if something similar has happened in the translation of Jane Austen’s works into other languages.

For further reading:

Chryssofós, Iris (junio, 2014). Las traducciones argentinas de un par de novelas de Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey y Lady Susan. Paper presented at Jornadas internas en honor a Jane Austen de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Crespo Allúe, María José (1981), La problemática de las versiones españolas de Persuasión de Jane Austen. Crítica de su traducción (doctoral thesis). Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.

Díaz Bild, Aída (2007). “Still the Great Forgotten? The Reception of Jane Austen in Spain” in Mandal, Anthony y Southam, Brian (eds.) (2007). The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe. London: Continuum; p. 188-204.

Dow, Gillian (2013). “Translations” in Sabor, Peter (ed.) (2015). The Cambridge Companion to Emma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 166-187.

García Soria, Cinthia (2013). ¿Lost in translation? La traducción de la obra de Jane Austen en el mundo de lengua española. Paper presented at Coloquio Interdisciplinario Jane Austen: Orgullos y Prejuicios en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Mexico City, Mexico.

Mandal, Anthony (2009). “Austen’s European Reception” in Johnson, Claudia L. and Tuite, Clara (eds.) (2009). A Companion to Jane Austen. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, p. 422-433.

Smith, Ellen (1985). “Spanish Translations of Northanger Abbey” in Persuasions 7, Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, p. 21-27. http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number7/smith.html

Wright, Andrew y Alazraki, Jaime (1975). “Jane Austen Abroad – Mexico” in Halperin, John (ed.) (1975) Jane Austen Bicentenary essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 304-306.

Twenty-first in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Carol Chernega, Sarah Woodberry, and Deborah Yaffe.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Miss Bates in Fairy-land

Margaret C. Sullivan is the author of Jane Austen Cover to Cover and The Jane Austen Handbook. She wrote about “The Manipulations of Henry and Mary Crawford” for the celebration I hosted in honour of Mansfield Park, and I’m delighted to introduce her guest post for Emma in the Snow.

Maggie is the Editrix of AustenBlog.com, where she has been, in her words, “holding forth on Jane Austen and popular culture since 2004.” She recently flew across the United States in the teeth of a blizzard to see Love & Friendship, the upcoming adaptation of Austen’s Lady Susan, at the Sundance Film Festival. She says she didn’t meet anyone famous at the Festival, “not even Faux Bradley Cooper,” but she saw “lots of stunning snow-covered mountains, which was way better.” Love & Friendship received the Official AustenBlog Seal of Approval. Maggie blogs at This Delightful Habit of Journaling as well as at AustenBlog. Here’s a photo from her trip to Utah.

I came to Jane Austen later in life than many, in my late 20s—that is, seven or eight years older than Miss Woodhouse. The first Austen I read was Emma. I was in a mall drugstore, looking for something to read, when a remaindered copy of Emma caught my eye, marked down to $2. People had been telling me for years that I should read Jane Austen, and the price was right, so I bought the book.

Somehow I had it in my mind that Austen had been living and writing in the early 20th century about an earlier time period. When I reached the scene where the guests were arriving for the Westons’ ball at the Crown, in particular Miss Bates’ arrival and her monologue that filled several pages of the paperback, I was so taken with the scene I suddenly wanted to know more about the author. I flipped to the little author mini-bio at the front of the book, and was astonished to learn that Austen had lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The humor and the brutally honest portrayal of the various characters felt very modern to me.

When Sarah asked me to participate in her “Emma in the Snow” event, that passage—Miss Bates’ monologue as she arrives at the ball—sprang to mind immediately, for lots of reasons. Because it was the first scene in Austen’s work that I remember absolutely loving as I read it; because it’s just darned funny; and maybe because I identify with Miss Bates a little bit, being a middle-aged spinster myself, and someone who, with the best of intentions, bores people at length about my odd interests like European royalty (and their tiaras … especially the tiaras) and tech devices and, oh yeah, Jane Austen. I suppose we’re all guilty, now and then, of saying “three things very dull indeed.”

“I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan’t I?” Illustration by C.E. Brock. (Source: Mollands.net)

But really there’s quite a lot going on in this short passage. On the surface it’s just hilarious, and the portrayal of Miss Bates as a garrulous middle-aged spinster is extremely fine, but there is more to it. Here is the passage, from Volume 3, Chapter 2 (Chapter 38), with apologies in advance for the length:

Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax, escorted by the two gentlemen, walked into the room; and Mrs. Elton seemed to think it as much her duty as Mrs. Weston’s to receive them. Her gestures and movements might be understood by any one who looked on like Emma, but her words, every body’s words, were soon lost under the incessant flow of Miss Bates, who came in talking, and had not finished her speech under many minutes after her being admitted into the circle at the fire. As the door opened she was heard,

“So very obliging of you!—No rain at all. Nothing to signify. I do not care for myself. Quite thick shoes. And Jane declares—Well!—(as soon as she was within the door) Well! This is brilliant indeed!—This is admirable!—Excellently contrived, upon my word. Nothing wanting. Could not have imagined it.—So well lighted up.—Jane, Jane, look—did you ever see any thing? Oh! Mr. Weston, you must really have had Aladdin’s lamp. Good Mrs. Stokes would not know her own room again. I saw her as I came in; she was standing in the entrance. ‘Oh! Mrs. Stokes,’ said I—but I had not time for more.”—She was now met by Mrs. Weston.—“Very well, I thank you ma’am. I hope you are quite well. Very happy to hear it. So afraid you might have a headache!—seeing you pass by so often, and knowing how much trouble you must have. Delighted to hear it indeed. Ah! dear Mrs. Elton, so obliged to you for the carriage!—excellent time.—Jane and I quite ready. Did not keep the horses a moment. Most comfortable carriage.—Oh! and I am sure our thanks are due to you, Mrs. Weston, on that score.—Mrs. Elton had most kindly sent Jane a note, or we should have been.—But two such offers in one day!—Never were such neighbours. I said to my mother, ‘Upon my word, ma’am⸺,’ Thank you, my mother is remarkably well. Gone to Mr. Woodhouse’s. I made her take her shawl—for the evenings are not warm—her large new shawl—Mrs. Dixon’s wedding-present.—So kind of her to think of my mother! Bought at Weymouth, you know—Mr. Dixon’s choice. There were three others, Jane says, which they hesitated about some time. Colonel Campbell rather preferred an olive. My dear Jane, are you sure you did not wet your feet?—It was but a drop or two, but I am so afraid:—but Mr. Frank Churchill was so extremely—and there was a mat to step upon—I shall never forget his extreme politeness.—Oh! Mr. Frank Churchill, I must tell you my mother’s spectacles have never been in fault since; the rivet never came out again. My mother often talks of your good-nature. Does not she, Jane?—Do not we often talk of Mr. Frank Churchill?—Ah! here’s Miss Woodhouse.—Dear Miss Woodhouse, how do you do?—Very well I thank you, quite well. This is meeting quite in fairy-land!—Such a transformation!—Must not compliment, I know (eyeing Emma most complacently)—that would be rude—but upon my word, Miss Woodhouse, you do look—how do you like Jane’s hair?—You are a judge.—She did it all herself. Quite wonderful how she does her hair!—No hairdresser from London I think could.—Ah! Dr. Hughes I declare—and Mrs. Hughes. Must go and speak to Dr. and Mrs. Hughes for a moment.—How do you do? How do you do?—Very well, I thank you. This is delightful, is not it?—Where’s dear Mr. Richard?—Oh! there he is. Don’t disturb him. Much better employed talking to the young ladies. How do you do, Mr. Richard?—I saw you the other day as you rode through the town—Mrs. Otway, I protest!—and good Mr. Otway, and Miss Otway and Miss Caroline.—Such a host of friends!—and Mr. George and Mr. Arthur!—How do you do? How do you all do?—Quite well, I am much obliged to you. Never better.—Don’t I hear another carriage?—Who can this be?—very likely the worthy Coles.—Upon my word, this is charming to be standing about among such friends!—And such a noble fire!—I am quite roasted. No coffee, I thank you, for me—never take coffee.—A little tea if you please, sir, by and bye,—no hurry—Oh! here it comes. Every thing so good!”

(This passage is a lot of fun to read aloud. I once did so for a book group to which I used to belong, with many dramatic flourishes. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. I was gasping for air at the end, too!)

Throughout the book, it feels like we’re supposed to feel sorry for Miss Bates. Mr. Knightley certainly means Emma to feel sorry for her—or at least feel compassion for her. However, here she is at a ball, not stuck at Hartfield with Mr. Woodhouse and her mother and unable to enjoy the yummy treats. Miss Bates has come to the ball to enjoy herself, and the enjoying starts the second she walks in. Frank Churchill has already expressed that sentiment: “though he did not say much, his eyes declared that he meant to have a delightful evening.” Miss Bates does not need her eyes to do any declaring; her mouth is more than up to the job.

She passes through the room and speaks to several friends: first Mrs. Stokes, “standing in the entrance”; Mrs. Weston, Mrs. Elton, Frank Churchill, Emma herself, Dr. and Mrs. Hughes, Mr. and Mrs. Otway, their (presumably) two daughters and two sons, the Coles are heard coming in and no doubt will be greeted in their turn, and Mr. Richard Hughes even leaves the young ladies to come over and pay his compliments. Such a host of friends! Such a noble fire! Tea, almost the instant she asks for it, though she was in no hurry for it! No wonder she exclaims, “This is delightful, is not it?” and “Every thing so good!”

There is so much consideration for her comfort. Mrs. Weston sent a note, offering to have their carriage pick up Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax; Emma and Harriet stopped to offer them a ride; the Eltons forgot them at first, but the carriage is immediately sent for them. Frank Churchill knows Miss Bates (and her charge) should not be forgotten, and waits with an umbrella. Her friends gather around her, and tea is brought. Ladies’ gowns and hair are admired with true enjoyment. She is very well, she assures each friend who asks how she does; quite well; never better.

Miss Bates is determined to have a good time, and determined to not let her circumstances get her down, and we can all learn from that. At middle age, life has passed her by. Did she ever have a lover, one wonders? Perhaps someone like Robert Martin, a yeoman farmer, not considered eligible for the vicar’s daughter (and, one notes, not invited to the ball, nor are his sisters, apparently), but who could perhaps have given the former Hetty Bates a comfortable home at least, and her mother and niece as well? A home where she might not be obliged to depend upon gifts of a hind-quarter of pork or a bushel of apples from neighbors, or even rides in their carriages? That is likely a subject that Jane Austen had meditated upon, having passed up such a home offered by Harris Bigg-Wither.

But Mr. Bigg-Wither was certainly of a social standing to be invited to balls given by his neighbors. Miss Bates may have had to give that up, if she “married down,” as Harriet Smith will have had to give up being visited by Miss Woodhouse (though perhaps not by Mrs. Knightley, not completely) when she marries Robert Martin. I wonder which of those choices Miss Bates would pick with the benefit of hindsight. No matter what it was, she would have made the best of it, and maybe that’s the message we’re supposed to take away from this.

Carpe diem, says Miss Bates. Live in the moment, and you will be quite well; never better. Even a middle-aged spinster can enjoy herself at a ball, writes (almost) middle-aged spinster Jane Austen. In 1813, not long before she started writing Emma, Austen wrote in a letter to her sister, “By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like” (6 November 1813). Or tea, one presumes.

I’m thrilled for Miss Bates and her enjoyment at the ball. Her arrival and conversation provide fun for the reader, but Jane Austen’s characters come so vividly to life that one cannot help but sometimes think of them as real people, and wonder about their inner lives. This scene is hilarious, but it also provides a different kind of enjoyment: that of knowing that Hetty Bates had at least one night in fairy-land. Don’t we all deserve that?

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Emma, edited and with an introduction by Juliette Wells (2015), and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).

Twentieth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Cinthia Garcia Soria, Carol Chernega, and Sarah Woodberry.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).

Why do readers object to the romance between Emma and Mr. Knightley?

Kirk Companion is a member of two Jane Austen book clubs in the Boston area, and for one of them, “Austen in Boston,” he also serves as one of the main organizers. The group has met in a variety of places, including Salem, Massachusetts—to discuss Northanger Abbey—and Georges Island in Boston Harbor. They sometimes read books by other writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell and, Kirk says, “Edith ‘I never met an unhappy ending I didn’t like’ Wharton.” I’m happy to introduce his guest post on the romance between Emma and Mr. Knightley. Welcome to Emma in the Snow, Kirk, and thank you to you and the members of Austen in Boston for sharing these beautiful photos with us. (Here’s the Facebook page for the group. You can also find them on Twitter: @AusteninBoston.)

Kirk often goes to JASNA Massachusetts meetings and sometimes travels further to attend JASNA Vermont events. In contrast to Austen in Boston, which holds meetings in public spaces, the other Jane Austen book club he belongs to tends to meet in members’ homes. Kirk tells me he has fond memories of visiting Box Hill on a trip to England a few years ago—he says that “even without the Austen connection it truly is lovely”—and he regrets that he has only a few photos from the trip. Here’s one of them.

He also sent me a recent photo of Boston in the snow.

And he sent a photo from an Austen in Boston meeting at Larz Anderson Park in Brookline, where the group talked about Gaskell’s North and South.

Photo by Rebecca Price

These last two photos are from an Austen in Boston picnic at World’s End, Hingham, which featured a discussion of Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence.

Photo by Shirley Goh

Photo by Shirley Goh

And here’s Kirk’s contribution to the conversations about Emma and Mr. Knightley.

She was more disturbed by Mr. Knightley’s not dancing, than by any thing else.—There he was, among the standers-by, where he ought not to be; he ought to be dancing…. —so young as he looked!—He could not have appeared to greater advantage perhaps any where, than where he had placed himself…. His tall, firm, upright figure among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes…. He moved a few steps nearer, and those few steps were enough to prove in how gentlemanlike a manner, with what natural grace, he must have danced, would he but take the trouble.

…

“Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley.

She hesitated a moment, and then replied, “With you, if you will ask me.”

“Will you?” said he, offering his hand.

“Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.”

“Brother and sister! no, indeed.”

(Chapter 38, from the Anchor Books edition of Emma, edited and annotated by David M. Shapard [2012])

Mr. Knightley is my favorite Austen hero. I wish I were more like him, so well able to tolerate the Mr. Woodhouses and Miss Bateses of the world. (Sadly, I’m more like his grumpy brother Mr. John Knightley—but enough about me). So, it was surprising to me to that several members of one of my two Austen bookclubs can’t stand the Emma/Mr. Knightley relationship. One person fixated on the fact that Mr. Knightley—being about 16 years older than Emma—has known her since she was an infant. Also, he’s acted as a mentor or surrogate relative throughout Emma’s formative years, especially since Emma hasn’t had a true active parent, given that Mr. Woodhouse has been too concerned with his own health, or guardian, given that Miss Taylor has always been too easy on her.

I was very curious about what others thought about the relationship between Emma and Mr. Knightley, so I discussed it at two different JASNA meetings and two different bookclubs. I had thought the reaction to them towards them was overwhelmingly positive. However, I was very surprised to find that it wasn’t. Some of the responses I heard: “I haven’t really thought about the prior relationship between Emma and Mr. Knightley”; “I don’t care about that”; and “I haven’t thought about it, but yeah … not thrilled by that.” In a group of five Janeites, the vote was 2½ for the romantic relationship between Emma and Mr Knightley and 2½ against, with one person arguing both in favour of and against the romance.

I’d be interested to know what all of you think of the romance. Does it bother you that Mr. Knightley is so much older than Emma? Do you think their marriage will be a happy one?

Nineteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret C. Sullivan, Cinthia Garcia Soria, and Carol Chernega.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Highbury Heights; or, George and Emma Knightley, Suburban Developers

Kate Scarth considered becoming an urban planner, but eventually decided to combine her love of literature with her interest in cities and geography by doing a PhD at the University of Warwick on “how Romantic-period novels (including Austen’s), deal with London’s growing suburbs.” She’s currently developing this project into a book and she’s made the case for Jane Austen and Charlotte Smith as suburban writers. She’s also written about L.M. Montgomery, and her article “Anne of the Suburbs” (which analyzes the depiction of “Patty’s Place” in “Kingsport”/Halifax in Anne of the Island) will be published in Women’s Writing.

Kate is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in English here in Halifax at Dalhousie University. She says her postdoc project “builds on geo-lit interests and focuses on London’s green geographies in the Romantic period.” At the moment she’s spending some time in St. John’s, Newfoundland, so she sent me a few photos of St. John’s in the snow. Here’s her guest post for Emma in the Snow, on Highbury as a suburb. Thanks, Kate!

A suburb in the snow

Are Emma Woodhouse, Mrs. Elton, Isabella Knightley, Isabella Thorpe, Maria Crawford, and Maria Bertram Rushworth original “desperate housewives”? All of these Jane Austen characters either live in or have something to say about the well-heeled Regency suburbs, forerunners of the affluent suburbia of lavish homes and manicured lawns inhabited by the women of TV’s Desperate Housewives (2004-12). Desperate Housewives’ landscape embodies both reality (a detached or semi-detached home surrounded by a lawn is the standard middle-class British and North American residence) and aspiration, given the size and opulence of the show’s homes. Desperate Housewives’ setting is also the kind of space that often comes under fire: the suburbs can represent sprawl, vulgarity, conformity, and cultural vacuousness. The affluent suburban landscape and the twin impulses of aspiration and satire were also at play in Emma’s England.

Jane Austen had something to say about the suburbs, as she did about many other things in the world around her. References to Greater London abound. Isabella Thorpe reveals her true social climbing stripes when, pretending to want a retired, rural cottage, she is in fact imagining a villa in Richmond, a suburb considered fashionable enough for the grand Mrs. Churchill’s convalescence. Admiral Crawford extensively landscapes the grounds of his Twickenham cottage, and while Henry is staying there and Maria Rushworth is in nearby Richmond, they start their illicit affair. Isabella Knightley insists to her father, Mr. Woodhouse, that the air of Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury is salubrious, unlike the rest of polluted London, and it therefore meets their exacting parental and medical standards. And, of course, Maple Grove (near Bristol) is home to Mrs. Elton’s Suckling relatives and their barouche-landau. Austen shows that the Regency suburbs were bound up with sex and marriage, money and class, love and children, luxury and consumerism, home renovations and landscaping, all suitable fodder for a Desperate Housewives episode.

Kate says she chose this photo because Regency suburbs were so dependent on horses.

Highbury is Austen’s most sustained look at a suburb. Sixteen miles from London, Highbury is firmly within Greater London (as early as the 1720s, Epsom, fifteen miles from London and also in Surrey, was suburbanizing as a commuter town for City merchants, as Chris Miele points out). Thomas Hothem and Tara Ghoshal Wallace have both discussed the many ways Highbury is suburban (or is what I am calling “Highbury Heights”). Like Epsom, Highbury is also a commuter town. For “eighteen or twenty years,” Mr. Weston had divided his time and space in a suburban way: “useful occupation” is spent in the City, while “leisure” and “the pleasures of society” are found in his “small house in Highbury.” At the novel’s start, Mr. Weston and his fellow merchant Mr. Cole have only semi-retired to Highbury and are still involved in London business. Mr. Weston continues to commute to London (at least occasionally). In his retirement, Mr. Weston can afford a “little estate adjoining to Highbury, which he had always longed for,” thus realizing the suburban dream of house plus land (Volume 1, Chapter 2). Highbury is also a suburban bedroom community dependent on London’s goods and services. Highburians purchase a piano and order ribbons and a folding-screen from the city; they also visit a hairdresser, law firm, dentist, picture framer, and Aspley’s circus.

While landlords of London-adjacent land (such as the Russells in Bloomsbury) were the Regency-era land developers in the conventional sense, Mr. Knightley and Emma are developers of suburban space in a cultural sense. By controlling social relations in Highbury, Mr. Knightley and Emma manage the transformation of the village into a suburb in a way that keeps them on top of its social hierarchy but that flexibly accommodates new, urban, middle-class elements. In other words, they set the cultural tone for the new suburban version of Highbury.

A Newfoundland regiment memorial that commemorates the battle of Beaumont Hamel, where many Newfoundlanders died in 1916.

The Westons’ Christmas Eve dinner party, also discussed in this series by Nora Bartlett, is a good (snowy) example of Mr. Knightley and Emma’s management. While Mr. Weston, the host, acts with “the utmost good-will,” he fails to control this space (Volume 1, Chapter 15). When snow threatens to strand everyone, he does not relieve Mr. Woodhouse’s or Isabella’s anxiety and causes Mrs. Weston uneasiness by calling her “to agree with him, that, with a little contrivance, every body might be lodged, which she hardly knew how to do, from the consciousness of there being but two spare rooms in the house.” Mr. Knightley takes charge: he goes outside to inspect the roads and is able to reassure everyone that reports of snow have been greatly exaggerated. He is soon joined by Emma in managing this space and getting everyone home safely: “while the others were variously urging and recommending, Mr. Knightley and Emma settled it in a few brief sentences.” Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Weston are the supporting managers. Earlier, Mrs. Weston and Emma had “tried earnestly to cheer [Mr. Woodhouse],” and later “the carriages came: and Mr. Woodhouse, always the first object on such occasions, was carefully attended to his own by Mr. Knightley and Mr. Weston.” Mr. Weston brings his good humour (and money) to Highbury, enriching the village socially and economically, but when his gregarious personality causes discomfort, he follows Mr. Knightley’s lead and attends to Mr. Woodhouse, who because of age, gender, and rank, is second in Highbury’s hierarchy. Ultimately then, Mr. Weston is not shaking up Highbury’s social hierarchies or ways of doing things.

When Mr. Knightley moves to the Woodhouses’ home, Hartfield, he and Emma (now the Knightleys) get their own suburban space to manage. Hartfield is surrounded by a “lawn and shrubberies” (Volume 1, Chapter 1), and like the newly arrived Highbury suburbanites, the Woodhouses’ money probably has urban ties. As an unlanded gentry family, their “fortune from other sources” (i.e., not the land, and thus rural, sources of wealth), likely comes from investments or government bonds held in London’s financial City (Volume 1, Chapter 16). Mr. Knightley and Emma already have a solid track record as Hartfield managers. Emma single-handedly runs Hartfield (and quite well since even the exacting Mr. Knightley compliments her hostessing skills), and he often takes Mr. Woodhouse’s place as host at the head of the table, writes his business letters, and is a conversational companion for Emma. However, Austen does not exactly let the newly minted Knightleys fade off into suburban bliss.

Mrs. Elton is an impediment to their Highbury-wide suburban development. The Sucklings and Maple Grove, not Mr. Knightley and Donwell Abbey, are Mrs. Elton’s models for suburban living. Mrs. Elton’s suburbia is one of display (via barouche-landau rides) and competition (she compares Maple Grove to Hartfield and the Churchills’ estate). She even tries to manage Mr. Knightley’s Donwell Abbey, as its “Lady Patroness” (Volume 3, Chapter 6). While Mr. Knightley limits her plans for her Donwell party (he puts a stop to eating outside and he invites the Woodhouses), Mrs. Elton’s party goes ahead in a way that undercuts Highburian etiquette: she makes fun of Mr. Woodhouse and bullies Jane Fairfax, she has the gypsy “parade” she disingenuously claims not to want to have, and she dominates verbally (prattling about strawberries and Maple Grove). Also, as the Knightleys are about to start their life together at suburban Hartfield, Mrs. Elton gets the last word on their wedding: using Maple Grove standards of “finery” and “parade” (Volume 3, Chapter 19), she finds the simple ceremony wanting.

Mrs. Elton thus challenges George and Emma Knightley, suburban developers. To conclude, I ask what kind of suburbanite you think Mrs. Elton is: does she represent the ascendency of vulgar, consumerist, and competitive upwardly mobile middle-class suburbanites? Or, given Diana Birchall’s defense, does she present a welcome challenge to an outdated rural, gentry, even patriarchal way of living?

Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Emma, edited by R.W. Chapman (1988).

Eighteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Kirk Companion, Margaret C. Sullivan, and Cinthia Garcia Soria.

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Friendship, Transformation, and the Hope of Reconciliation

In 2014, when we were celebrating 200 years of Mansfield Park, Margaret Horwitz wrote about “The Comfort of Friendship” for my blog. Today I’m happy to introduce her contribution to Emma in the Snow, a guest post on the friendship between Emma and Mr. Knightley.

Margaret has a Ph.D. in Film Studies from UCLA, and she’s a visiting professor of literature at New College Berkeley, an institute of the Graduate Theological Union. She’s a Life Member of JASNA and she’s given many talks on Jane Austen’s novels and their film and television adaptations, as well as on the prayers Austen composed. She presented at the 2004 JASNA AGM in Los Angeles and at the 2008 AGM in Chicago, and in 2008-2009 she was a travelling lecturer for JASNA’s western region.

A few of the recent posts for this series have included photos showing what the weather looks like between December and March in places other than Emma’s Highbury (or my Halifax). In keeping with that pattern, here’s the Golden Gate Bridge, photographed in December by Margaret’s husband, Arnie Horwitz. Thank you for sharing this stunning view with us, Margaret and Arnie, and thank you, Diana Birchall, for your midsummer-themed guest post on “Mrs. Elton’s Donkey” and your photo of a winter sunset in Santa Monica, which prompted me to invite contributors to send photos of scenes that complement or contrast with that half inch of snow in Highbury.

(I wish I’d thought of this idea back in December—I missed the chance to see glimpses of, for example, December in Scotland, where Nora Bartlett lives, or January in Australia, where Susannah Fullerton lives. Ah, well—we’re making it up as we go along, and that’s part of the fun of doing this as a blog series rather than as a formal collection of essays.)

Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his.—They had reached the house.

“You are going in, I suppose,” said he.

“No”—replied Emma—quite confirmed by the depressed manner in which he still spoke—”I should like to take another turn. Mr. Perry is not gone.” And, after proceeding a few steps, she added—”I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain.—But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation—as a friend, indeed, you may command me.—I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think.”

(Volume 3, Chapter 13, from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Emma [2008].)

I find this passage one of the most crucial and rewarding moments in Emma. The recurring play on the word “friend” in the novel, and the increasingly significant stages of Emma’s self-awareness, converge in her conversation with Mr. Knightley, who has just returned from London. Harriet Smith’s recent revelation of an attachment to Mr. Knightley, which Harriet feels is reciprocated, has left Emma with the realization of her own love for him, but with little “hope.” In this scene set in the garden at Hartfield, Emma allays Mr. Knightley’s concerns about her response to news of Frank Churchill’s engagement to Jane Fairfax. Emma then progresses through three stages in fulfilling her “resolution,” made the prior evening, to have “better conduct.”

First of all, having noticed Mr. Knightley’s “mortification” at her refusal to let him continue speaking, Emma feels that she “could not bear to give him pain.” She imagines he wishes to “confide in her—perhaps to consult her,” and is afraid she will hear his declaration of love for her young friend and protégée, Harriet. The alliteration in “confide” and “consult” continues and strengthens the word “cost” in her commitment that, “cost her what it would, she would listen,” for the benefit of her lifelong friend, Mr. Knightley. [My italics.]

A pattern of alliteration in the next stage emphasizes Emma’s intent to “assist his resolution” to marry Harriet, or even “reconcile him to it,” in order to “relieve him,” if Mr. Knightley is hesitating because of Harriet’s low social status. Though apprehensive and making assumptions, Emma understands the character of her old friend, recognizing that a “state of indecision” would be “intolerable … to such a mind as his.” She makes a second determination in which she is “quite confirmed,” after noting, but misunderstanding, the “depressed manner” of Mr. Knightley’s comment, “You are going in, I suppose.”

In the third stage, Emma carries out her plan, reminiscent of other points in the novel where recognition of fault causes her to repent. She admits to Mr. Knightley that, “I stopped you ungraciously just now.” Her adding, “and, I am afraid, gave you pain,” returns us to her earlier response that she “could not bear to give him pain.” The repetition of this phrase discloses a movement from inner contrition to verbal confession. Emma courageously invites Mr. Knightley to say what she believes will give her the greatest pain, representing a milestone in her growth.

In fact, she encourages him to “speak openly … as a friend,” and to ask her “opinion of any thing” that he “may have in contemplation,” and repeats the phrase “as a friend,” in an acknowledgment of his privilege as a trusted confidant. Emma’s promise to “hear whatever you like,” and then to “tell you exactly what I think” suggests an increased willingness to confront a truth which she is convinced is unpleasant. Her description of the nature of their conversation indicates a new level of parity in a friendship with overtones of “sister” and older “brother,” given the marriage of their siblings and the difference in their ages.

Emma’s readiness in this passage to “give just praise to Harriet” recalls a much earlier conversation with Mr. Knightley, when she campaigns for Mr. Elton as a suitor for Harriet. In Volume 1, Chapter 8, she “playfully” argues that “such a girl as Harriet is exactly what every man delights in.” She even remarks, “Were you, yourself, ever to marry, she is the very woman for you”—the excruciating possibility Emma believes she is now facing here in Volume 3, Chapter 13, and one she feels would be the consequence of her own misguided behavior.

Though Emma often defends Harriet, both out of affection and a desire to wield influence, her assessment is not “just,” and lacks good judgment, a quality she struggles to gain in the course of the novel. Emma’s willingness to be an advocate is at this point a much costlier act of friendship with regard to both Harriet and Mr. Knightley, since she prepares to set aside her own hopes. It is gratifying to see Emma respond sensitively during (rather than after) what is perhaps the greatest test of her integrity, a demonstration of her advancement in maturity.

Of course, just after this passage, we learn that Mr. Knightley wants to be more than a “friend” to Emma, that she will not be crushed by listening to him, nor need to say anything in support of Harriet’s claims (while having compassion for her). However, as Emma does not yet know this, her meditations and then spoken words mark an admirable resolve, and also indicate a high point in the two characters’ journey toward an even deeper and more balanced friendship in their joint humility.

While one sees a greater emphasis on Emma’s transformation as the title character, Mr. Knightley’s jealousy of Frank Churchill clouds his thinking; he misunderstands Emma’s actions, as she misconstrues those of others. In this novel, no character, however admirable, can really know the mind of another. As readers, we may infer that no human being is omniscient.

Mr. Knightley is afraid he is not the first for Emma, in the same way she fears not being first to him. Yet at this moment, they each approach the other to give solace in reference to a perceived rival. They both meet the challenge of this test by offering comfort, in place of making a claim to be the “first” to the other.

Instead of Emma having to “reconcile” Mr. Knightley to marrying Harriet, he and Emma experience a reconciliation, which began with her repentant action and his forgiving look over the events at Box Hill. These characters resume a primacy in each other’s lives, which they felt was at risk. Though Emma ultimately gives Mr. Knightley an affirmative response to his profession of love for her, the mettle they show in this passage reveals that they can now genuinely be the “friends” they have long called each other, with renewed hope from their transformation.

Seventeenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Kate Scarth, Kirk Companion, and Margaret C. Sullivan.

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Emma Abroad

Gillian Dow is curating an exhibition focusing on “Jane Austen’s Emma at 200: From English Village to Global Appeal,” which will be open to the public at Chawton House Library from March 21st to September 25th. She’s an Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, and Executive Director of Chawton House Library, where she has worked in a variety of positions since 2005. She has published essays on translations of Austen in the Cambridge University Press Companions to Pride and Prejudice (2013) and Emma (2015), and she and Clare Hanson edited Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives (2012), which “shows how Austen’s life and work is being re-framed and re-imagined in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture.” Feminisms, Fictions, Futures: Women’s Writing 1660–1830, a collection Gillian edited with Jennie Batchelor, will be published this year by Palgrave.

I’ve been following the updates about the “Emma at 200″ exhibition on Twitter (@ChawtonHouse) and the Chawton House Library Facebook page, and it’s been fascinating to learn about what will be on display. For example, thanks to a collaboration between the Library and the Lady’s Magazine Project “Stitch Off,” visitors will be able to see examples of embroidery based on patterns published in the Lady’s Magazine in 1775 and 1796. In fact, there’s even an opportunity to contribute to the exhibition, which might be of interest to those of you who are skilled in embroidery. (See “The Great Stitch Off Goes to Chawton House Library” for details.) I wish I could make the trip to Chawton this year, but for now I’ll have to content myself with reading about all the wonderful things that will be on display, including first editions, the first French translation, and Charlotte Brontë’s letter about Emma. (I’ve also sent a donation to help support the exhibition, and I’ll include the link to the donation page here in case some of you feel inclined to do so as well.)

I’m delighted to introduce Gillian’s guest post for “Emma in the Snow”—and the fabulous images that accompany it. So far in this series, we’ve had pictures of editions of Emma, and pictures of snow (and pictures of palm trees and flowers…), but we haven’t seen Emma in the snow. Until now. Thanks, Gillian!

This image is courtesy of Goucher College, Baltimore.

When Sarah contacted me to invite me to take part in her “Emma in the Snow” series, I had only the roughest of outlines of what I wanted to say. But I knew at once what image I would use to accompany my post. Here, in a walking outfit, is a 1951 Finnish Emma in the Snow—complete with muff, and a delightful bustle. A transposition of language and, of course, period. This Emma might have walked out of the fashion pages of the 1880s or 1890s. And so might the figures walking away from her in the background—Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill? Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton? Was claret the winter colour for 1888? Is this Emma inspired by the New Woman in literature of the 1880s—by Ibsen, Henry James or indeed Olive Schreiner? So many questions to ask the Finnish publishing house, the designer, and the translator.

In recent years, my own work on Jane Austen—and indeed my place of work—has led me to think about the importance of understanding place and period in an understanding of the novels. It’s a historicist argument, of course. The late great Marilyn Butler wrote, forty years ago in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, that “No book is improved by being taken out of its context.” And I’m well placed to consider context and authentic setting: my office overlooks the kind of landscape described by Emma in Emma on her visit to Mr. Knightley’s seat. Donwell Abbey—with “its abundance of timber in rows and avenues”—and rambling and irregular Chawton House—with “many comfortable, and one or two handsome rooms”—have a great deal in common.

Certainly, literary tourism would not exist if generations of readers did not feel that much was to be gained from a visit to authors’ homes, and the places that inspired their work. And yet an immersive fictive experience—which I am sure most readers of this blog will agree Austen’s Emma is—cannot, must not, depend on where one is when one reads a book. Whether sitting under an English Oak, next to a cactus, or up a brutalist skyscraper in the centre of a metropolis, one creates the world of a novel oneself. I reread George Justice’s edition of Emma in the snow myself this January, when I had the good fortune to spend a few days in the French Alps. The Alpine setting neither enhanced, nor detracted from, Austen’s characters and their world.

Emma in the Alps

This has some implications for the popularity of Austen’s Emma in the global literary marketplace—something I explored in an essay for Peter Sabor’s Companion to the novel (The Cambridge Companion to Emma [2015]). I was very taken by Janet Todd’s recent post for this series on the English nationalism apparent in Emma. I quite agree. But the continent of course impinges—and not only through Emma’s own reading (remember it’s Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s Adelaide and Theodore that Emma brings to mind when she reflects on the birth of a daughter to Mrs. Weston). I’m still struck, when looking at the fate of Emma abroad, how little the English setting of three or four families in a country village mattered to foreign publishers and translators. They have always reworked the novel to suit the tastes of their original readers.

Take the first French translation, published as La Nouvelle Emma in 1816, just a few short months after the original English was brought out by John Murray, himself a publisher with a finger in many continental pies (he had published Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne in both French and in English translation just two years previously). Nearly all the names for Austen’s characters in this first French translation are made more appealing to the first readers. Emma Woodhouse remains “Emma,” and Augusta Hawkins is still Augusta, but Frank Churchill becomes “Franck,” and other names are turned into their French equivalents: “Jeanne” and “Jean” for Jane Fairfax and John Knightley, “Georges” for Mr. Knightley himself, and in the case of plain Harriet Smith, the Frenchified “Henriette.” Some passages are shortened: Miss Bates’s monologues seem to have tried the patience of the first French translator much as they did Emma herself. And by the third volume, the translator seems to have been running out of steam—more small cuts are apparent in this volume than in others.

There is also one very notable change in the text that cannot have been due to exasperation or fatigue. The passage in which Mr. Knightley comments on Frank Churchill’s character is very well known:

No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very “aimable,” have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him. (Volume 1, Chapter 18)

A contrast between the French and English characters, to the detriment of the French, is commonplace in British Romantic-period fiction, and of course has its roots much further back in literary history. Michèle Cohen has demonstrated convincingly that during the eighteenth century “sprightly conversation,” paying of compliments, and verbosity began to represent “the shallow and inferior intellect of English women and the French” (Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century [1996]). In Emma, French manners represent a genuine threat to the English social order and customs: the threat is embodied in Frank Churchill himself, with his appetite for “abroad” fuelled by perusing “views in Swisserland” (Volume 3, Chapter 6). Here is how the translator of La Nouvelle Emma renders Georges Knightley’s discussion of Franck Churchill:

Non, Emma, votre amiable jeune homme ne peut l’être qu’en italien et non en anglais. Il peut etre très-agréable, tres-bien élevé, tres poli, mais il n’a pas cette delicatesse anglaise qui porte a compatir aux sensations d’autrui.

There is elision here, certainly: Mr. Knightley’s “nothing really amiable about him” is completely lost in translation. More striking, however, is the replacement of the counterfoil to true English delicacy with not a lesser French “amiability,” but an inferior Italian sense of the word. The translator must have felt that this slight to the French character would be too much for the intended readers in the French-speaking world.

It’s perhaps a testament to her broad appeal and her durability that Austen’s novels have crossed borders and settings—in print and on screen—since their first appearance. This Emma Abroad is perhaps not exactly the Emma we Anglo-American readers know and love. But she has countless admirers of her own.

Sixteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret Horwitz, Kate Scarth, and Kirk Companion.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).