Robert Rodi's Blog, page 6

Emma, chapters 52-55

Everything is very nearly perfect in Jane Austen’s Emma-Land, the Most Magical Place On Earth™. Only one or two lingering nuisances need to be resolved before the happily-ever-after sign can go up for good, and we’ve got four whole chapters to resolve them. Clearly, we’re not in anything resembling a race to the finish line, here.
Emma is Austen’s longest novel, and beyond doubt her most leisurely. We find ourselves hovering near the end of this 462-page whopper, and it’s all been very enjoyable; but even as we wonder how she’s going to fill the 33 pages yet to come, we also wonder what she’s filled 429 pages with already. If someone were to ask you, right now, to jot down the novel’s plot, you’d have a tough time filling a paragraph. As I’ve noted previously, Emma is the least consequential of Austen’s novels; nothing much is ever really at stake. My first time through it, I got to this point in the text, saw how few pages remained, and said to myself, “Wait—this is it?” and flipped ahead, convinced I’d find phrases like unexpected disaster and unfortunately timed demise and profound disturbation in Miss Woodhouse’s situation popping out at me. But no. Emma is basically a lovely saunter through a Regency funhouse, but for me it lacks the narrative urgency, the comic intensity, of Pride and Prejudice, or even Mansfield Park. I know it has its passionate advocates; but for me, it’s Austen in lyrical, pastoral mode, and I prefer her urbane, satirical one.
About those two dangling threads: The chief of them is, of course, Harriet Smith, who readily agrees to Emma’s proposal that they avoid meeting for the time being, because of the whole my-Mr. Knightley-not-yours business.
Harriet expressed herself very much, as might be supposed, without reproaches, or apparent sense of ill usage; and yet Emma fancied there was a something of resentment, a something bordering on it in her style, which increased the desirableness of their being separate. It might be only her own consciousness; but it seemed as if an angel only could have been quite without resentment under such a stroke.
I wish Austen had given us a sample of Harriet’s reply, so we could judge that “something of resentment” ourselves. I personally like to think Harriet has belatedly discovered sarcasm, and written something along the lines of, “I will be only too happy to absent myself from the august presence of Miss Woodhouse, until such time as I am once again fit to kneel before her in unfeigned subjugation.” But perhaps I dream.
Fortunately, Emma makes good on her plan to score Harriet an invitation to John and Isabella’s house in London, and soon Harriet’s out of Highbury altogether. Which means Emma can settle back and groove without guilt on Mr. Knightley’s visits, no stinging sensation in the back of her neck reminding her “how disappointed a heart was near her, how much might at that moment, and at a little distance, be enduring by the feelings which she had led astray herself.”
If getting Harriet out of her range of vision all it takes for Emma to be able to forget about her, I don’t hold out much hope for her as a housekeeper. There’d be so much debris swept under her rugs, you’d need hiking gear to cross them. Good thing she’s got staff.
Emma’s second unresolved issue is her father, who has yet to be told of her engagement. She’s waiting for the safe delivery of Mrs. Weston’s baby, presumably because Mr. Woodhouse is currently in a state of high anxiety about that situation, and not without cause. Childbirth was a dodgy business in pre-modern times, and this is, remember, a man who turns to jelly at the threat of an open window. Emma, however, seems to have no worries on Mrs. Weston’s account, and in fact enjoys the prospect of “a fortnight, at least, of leisure and peace of mind” before the infant arrives.
As for how to fill that fortnight, she soon decides, “equally as a duty and a pleasure,” to drop in on Jane Fairfax.
She ought to go—and she was longing to see her; the resemblance of their present situations increasing every other motive of good will. It would be a secret satisfaction; but the consciousness of a similarity of prospect would certainly add to the interest with which she should attend to any thing Jane might communicate.
Meaning, of course, that Emma’s now hiding a secret engagement too, so any tips she can pick up from the expert would be just soopah.
Visiting Jane without an invitation is a bit of a risk; the last time Emma tried it, there was all that bustling about and “I’ll tell her you’re sick” and people fleeing the room just as Emma reached it. No such theatrics this time; in fact the house seems utterly still. Then Jane appears, so happy to see Emma that she meets her on the stairs, “coming eagerly forward as if no other reception of her were felt sufficient.” She looks unspeakably improved, too, from the last time Emma saw her; no longer haggard or drawn, she glows with health and vigor. Yeah, a hot guy with a couple hundred acres will do that.
Jane’s readiness to greet Emma seems to promise a nice, cozy chat with lots of confidences exchanged, but then Emma hears from beyond the door the unmistakable braying of Mrs. Elton, and there goes that.
Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Elton were together. Miss Bates was out, which accounted for the previous tranquility. Emma could have wished Mrs. Elton elsewhere; but she was in a humour to have patience with every body; and as Mrs. Elton met her with unusual graciousness, she hoped the rencontre would do them no harm.
Emma quickly figures out why Mrs. Elton is being so polite to her: she’s obviously in on the secret of Jane’s engagement to Frank, and she thinks Emma isn’t. This is all Mrs. Elton needs to be happy. Put her in a room with three other people and she’ll figure out a hierarchy, with herself at the top of it. This is Jane’s apartment; she’s Jane’s good friend, in Jane’s deepest confidence; and she now gets a chance to wield that confidence like a weapon, by repeatedly making little remarks hinting at the engagement, then winking at Jane and saying things like, But of course we won’t speak of that now, the implication being that Emma, seated right next to them (probably touching their goddamn knees in the tiny Bates apartment) is an outsider.
This makes for a pretty hilarious scene, as Emma and Jane can’t get a word in due to Mrs. Elton making repeated sallies onto forbidden ground, then showily retreating.
“Do not you think, Miss Woodhouse, our saucy little friend here is charmingly recovered? Do not you think her cure does Perry the highest credit? (here was a side glance of great meaning at Jane.) Upon my word, Perry has restored her in a wonderful short time! Oh, if you had seen her, as I did, when she was at the worst!” And when Mrs. Bates was saying something to Emma, whispered farther, “We do not say a word of any assistance that Perry might have; not a word of a certain young physician from Windsor. Oh no, Perry shall have all the credit.”
At one point, she does a little feint in the general direction of Frank, just enough to tease at her secret knowledge; then when Emma turns her head to look at Mrs. Bates’s knitting, she whispers to Jane, “I mentioned no names, you will observe. Oh no! cautious as a minister of state. I managed it extremely well.”
There are very few rampaging monsters in Emma, as compared to Austen’s other novels; but I have to say, Mrs. Elton is more than capable of shouldering that burden all by herself.
We get another injection of comic energy when Miss Bates returns, and nearly drops stone dead from the honor of finding Miss Woodhouse and Mrs. Elton both in her sitting room. She goes stuttering on in her machine-gun manner, but is hilariously unable to remember whether she’s permitted to speak of Frank or not.
“Thank you, dear Miss Woodhouse, you are all kindness. It is impossible to say—Yes, indeed, I quite understand—dearest Jane’s prospects—that is, I do not mean. But she is charmingly recovered. How is Mr. Woodhouse? I am so glad.—Quite out of my power.—Such a happy little circle as you find us here.—Yes, indeed.—Charming young man!—that is—so very friendly; I mean good Mr. Perry!—such attention to Jane!”
You have to laugh, imagining Jane’s agonies right about now, flanked by the two worst women in the world to be entrusted with any secret: Mrs. Elton, because her pride won’t let her conceal it; Miss Bates, because her tongue is too loose to hold it.
Emma keeps hoping Mrs. Elton will just go away already, but no, she’s waiting for her caro sposo to fetch her. “He promised to come to me as soon as he could disengage himself from Knightley; but he and Knightley are shut up together in deep consultation. Mr. E. is Knightley’s right hand.”
Apparently not so much, as Mr. E. shows up a short while later, royally miffed at having walked all the way to Donwell Abbey in the heat only to find its owner not there. “Such a dreadful broiling morning!...And no apology left, no message for me. The housekeeper declared she knew nothing of my being expected. Very extraordinary! And nobody knew at all which way he had gone…Miss Woodhouse, this is not like our friend Knightley. Can you explain it?”
Mr. E.’s put his foot in it there. Why is he asking Miss Woodhouse to explain Knightley’s behavior, when the expert on Knightley is seated right next to him? In fact, Mrs. Elton knows exactly what’s happened.
“My dear Mr. E., he must have left a message for you, I am sure he must. Not even Knightley could be so very eccentric;—and his servants forgot it. Depend upon it that was the case: and very likely to happen with the Donwell servants, who are all, I have often observed, extremely awkward and remiss. I am sure I would not have such a creature as his Harry stand at our sideboard for any consideration. And as for Mrs. Hodges, Wright holds her very cheap indeed. She promised Wright a receipt, and never sent it.”
Mr. E. begs to disagree (that’s got to cost him, later). The problem’s not with the servants, but with Knightley himself. Why, he met his estate manager, William Larkins, who “seemed rather out of humour. He did not know what was come to his master lately, he said, but he could hardly ever get the speech of him.”
Emma, of course, knows exactly what’s come to William’s master lately, because she’s it. She’s also got a pretty good guess as to where William’s master is right now, which is at Hartfield, waiting for her to get her pretty little tuckus back there. Which she makes up her mind to do right this minute, that he might be saved from “sinking deeper in aggression towards Mr. Elton, if not towards William Larkins.” I’d have put that the other way around, but never mind.
Emma and Jane have a sweet girl-talk moment as they descend the stairs. Emma says it’s probably best there were other people here today, otherwise “I might have been tempted to introduce a subject, to ask questions, to speak more openly than might have been strictly correct. I feel that I should certainly have been impertinent.”
But Jane protests: “The danger would have been of my wearying you” with all she has to say. Which is principally how grateful she is that all her friends are being so understanding about the unforgivable way she hid her engagement for so long. Emma assures her she has nothing to apologize for. But Jane knows better.
“You are very kind, but I know what my manners were to you. So cold and artificial! I had always a part to act. It was a life of deceit! I know that I must have disgusted you.”
Which is of course bang-on. Still, she and Emma agree to forgive each other, and whaddaya know, it’s another sunshine day in Emma-Land, as Emma finally hooks up with the gal pal she’s supposed to have been besties with all along. The only fly in the ointment, alas, is that they’ve reached this stage of mutual crushiness just as Jane’s on the verge of being swept away forever by Frank. But Jane assures her that there’s no danger of that happening immediately:
“…I will own to you (I am sure it will be safe) that so far as our living with Mr. Churchill at Enscombe, it is settled. There must be three months, at least, of deep mourning; but when they are over, I imagine there will be nothing more to wait for.”
Emma jumps up and down and claps her hands and says, “This is just what I wanted to be assured of. Oh! if you only knew how much I love every thing that is decided and open!” Yes, Emma says that. Austen ends the chapter here, so we don’t get to learn whether, on her arrival back at Hartfield, Knightley asks why her nose is now an inch longer.
Jump-cut to a few weeks later and the debut of a baby girl at Randalls. Emma, we learn, has been particularly hoping for a girl, but emphatically not with an eye towards setting her up with one of John and Isabella’s boys, no no no. But give her fifteen years and how much you wanna bet.
Meanwhile Emma and her man have come up against a bit of a hurdle. She’s always called him “Mr. Knightley,” ever since she was old enough to speak, but because of her feline charm it’s never sounded very formal to him. “And yet it is formal,” he insists. “I want you to call me something else, but I do not know what.” It’s a safe guess he’s already ruled out Pooky, Love-buns, and Daddy Smoochums.
As for Emma, she’s stumped, too. She remembers once calling him George, “in one of my amiable fits, about ten years ago. I did it because I thought it would offend you; but, as you made no objection, I never did it again.” Well, duh. If she wanted to offend him, she should’ve chosen something that wasn’t his actual name. Like Chico, or Killer Diller, or The Schnoz. (Can you tell I’m having fun here?)
“And cannot you call me ‘George’ now?”
“Impossible! I never can call you any thing but ‘Mr. Knightley.’ I will not promise even to equal the elegant terseness of Mrs. Elton, by calling you Mr. K. But I will promise,” she added presently, laughing and blushing, “I will promise to call you once by your Christian name. I do not say when, but perhaps you may guess where…”
We read this, and we think oh yeah baby, bam-shakka-wayoh,but it turns out she only means on the altar when they’re exchanging vows.
Despite all the affectionate banter (and there are pages and pages of it), there’s still something wedged between them; which is that Emma hasn’t yet had the courage to confess how she misled Harriet into being in love with him. “The pain of being obliged to practise concealment towards him, was very little inferior to the pain of having made Harriet unhappy.”
In fact they don’t speak of Harriet at all. Nor does anyone else; her name doesn’t even come up when John Knightley—who’s got Harriet under his roof at the moment, remember—writes to congratulate his brother on his engagement. Knightley shows Emma the letter, warning him that John “is so far from making flourishes, that any other young woman might think him rather cool in her praise.” Fortunately, Emma knows John well enough not to take offense at the terseness of his good wishes (which we don’t see, but are apparently along the lines of, You might have done worse, just don’t ask me how right now). Knightley, however, is a little put out on her behalf.
“Oh!” she cried with more thorough gaiety, “if you fancy your brother does not do me justice, only wait till my dear father is in on the secret, and hear his opinion. Depend upon it, he will be much farther from doing youjustice.”
Like I said—pages of this.
Inevitably, Emma does break the news to Mr. Woodhouse, summoning up all her available resources of firmness, good cheer, diplomacy, and reassurance, and probably with a defibrillator on hand in case he goes into cardiac arrest. She tells him of “a plan to promote the happiness of all—she and Mr. Knightley meant to marry; by which means Hartfield would receive the constant addition of that person’s company, whom she knew he loved, next to his daughter and Mrs. Weston, best in the world.”
He reacts—as he does to any hint of change, of forward movement, of life—with shock and horror. He reminds Emma that she’s always said she’d never marry, as if that vow were legally binding and he just might draw up papers and file suit against her if she breaks it; and then he reminds her of “poor Isabella, and poor Miss Taylor”, whose terrible fates as beloved wives and mothers ought to be cautionary tales to Emma. But she shoots back that she’s not to be compared to them, because they left Hartfield, while she’s staying; her husband’s coming to her, not the reverse.
Would he not like to have [Mr. Knightley] always on the spot? Yes. That was all very true. Mr. Knightley could not be there too often; he should be glad to see him every day: but they did see him every day as it was. Why could not they go on as before?
Mr. Woodhouse is so obviously forgetting the (ahem) principal benefit of the conjugal estate, that you have to wonder how much whoopee he ever made in his own marriage. Not a whole helluva lot, if it can now have slipped his mind entirely. How he managed to father two daughters at all, is a mystery. I can only guess he and Mrs. Woodhouse occasionally bumped in the hallway.
Mrs. Weston is surprised by the news as well, though happily so, and she spends the better part of a page going over what an extra-super-special slice of wonderfulness it is for everyone concerned. Austen is wise to have parceled out Mrs. Weston in small doses over the course of the novel, because it’s taken her this long to bore me.
Her husband is a different story; he retains quite a bit of comic brio.
Mr. Weston had his five minutes’ share of [surprise in the news]; but five minutes were enough to familiarize the idea to his quickness of mind. He saw the advantages of the match, and rejoiced in them with all the constancy of his wife; but the wonder of it was very soon nothing; and by the end of an hour, he was not far from believing that he had always foreseen it.
Mr. Weston goes to Highbury the next morning to tell Jane the news (“Was she not like a daughter, his eldest daughter?—he must tell her”), and Miss Bates naturally hears it at the same time, which means that by lunchtime it’s spread all over Highbury, by dinner to all major world capitals, and by bedtime to the farthest flung desert outposts and tropical fiefdoms.
Everybody approves the match, and although there are minor reservations about the unorthodox living arrangements of the couple, “on the whole there was no serious objection raised, except in one habitation—the vicarage. There, the surprise was not softened by any satisfaction.” Quite the opposite; Mrs. Elton is propelled into the highest of dudgeons.
“Poor Knightley! poor fellow!—sad business for him. She was extremely concerned; for, though very eccentric, he had a thousand good qualities. How could he be so taken in? Did not think him at all in love—not in the least. Poor Knightley! There would be an end of all pleasant intercourse with him. How happy he had been to come and dine with them whenever they asked! But that would be all over now. Poor fellow! No more exploring parties to Donwell made for her. Oh no; there would be a Mrs. Knightley to throw cold water on every thing. Extremely disagreeable! But she was not at all sorry that she had abused the housekeeper the other day. Shocking plan, living together. It would never do. She knew a family near Maple Grove who had tried it, and been obliged to separate before the end of the first quarter.”
Aaaaand scene.
Stop and take a bow, Mrs. Elton. We’ve loved every epithet you’ve hurled, every insinuation you’ve snarled, every boast you ever brayed. We’re genuinely sorry to see you go, and will console ourselves for your loss by now and then thinking fondly of you sailing regally up the high street of Highbury, berating tradesman and beating stray dogs with your parasol.
But wait; we’re still in wrap-up mode. Time passes, and Mr. Knightley greets his bride-to-be with a teasing little paradox:
“I have something to tell you, Emma; some news.”
“Good or bad?” said she, quickly, looking up in his face.
“I do not know which it ought to be called.”
“Oh, good I am sure. I see it in your countenance. You are trying not to smile.”
“I am afraid,” said he, composing his features, “I am very much afraid, my dear Emma, that you will not smile when you hear it.”
“Indeed! but why so?—I can hardly imagine that any thing which pleases or amuses you should not please and amuse me too.”
And so on, and so forth, until he takes mercy on her and delivers the blow: “You are prepared for the worst, I see; and very bad it is. Harriet Smith marries Robert Martin.”
Emma is thunderstruck (“her eyes, in eager gaze, said ‘No, this is impossible!’ but her lips were closed”) and asks him repeatedly whether he’s sure, whether he didn’t just misinterpret something someone said or have a very vivid nightmare after too much three-cheese pizza or something. And Knightley reassures her that there’s no mistake: he’s had it from Robert Martin’s own lips. He’s proposed, and been accepted.
Emma, to his astonishment, is actually pleased by the news, now that the floor is back beneath her feet and the ceiling once again over her head, instead of the other way around. Of course she’s happy; it erases one more blemish from her conscience. Girl’s got mad luck that way.
She’s eager to hear every detail. But as Knightley says, “It is a very simple story.” He himself sent Robert Martin to London with some papers for his brother. John Knightley thanked Robert for the errand by inviting him to join the family group (which included Harriet) at a circus performance that evening; during which Robert became such a favorite that he was asked to dinner the next night—giving him more face time with the dewy Miss Smith. Sufficient, in fact, to embolden him to get her alone after the meal and pop the same question he’d popped a year earlier. And with a significantly happier result.
Knightley, not entirely convinced Emma’s as okay with this news as she’s giving out to be, tries to persuade her that it really is a very good thing.
“[Robert Martin’s] situation is an evil; but you must consider it as what satisfies your friend; and I will answer for your thinking better and better of him as you know him more: his good sense and good principles would delight you. As far as the man is concerned, you could not wish your friend in better hands. His rank in society I would alter if I could; which is saying a great deal, I assure you, Emma.”
But she’s not so worked up about his rank in society anymore, pointing out that “Her connections may be worse than his: in respectability of character, there can be no doubt that they are.” No, any lingering stupefaction she may be showing is just due to her conviction that Harriet was “very lately more determined against him, much more than she was before.” Though she still doesn’t admit why.
Knightley responds with the best summation of Harriet we’ve had yet:
“You ought to know your friend best…but I should say she was a good-tempered, soft-hearted girl, not likely to be very, very determined against any young man who told her he loved her.”
Or any middle-aged man. Or any wizened old man. Or any man of any age who didn’t actually say he loved her, but who winked at her and dropped a few broad hints. Or any man who sat next to her on the tram. Or any man, period.
Knightley’s so perplexed by Emma’s pleasure at the news that he can’t resist commenting on it: “You are materially changed since we talked on this subject before.” She replies, “I hope so—for at that time I was a fool.” This prompts him to admit that he was a bit of a fool, too, in his initial opinion of Harriet, and is now “very willing to grant you all [her] good qualities.”
“I have taken some pains for your sake, and for Robert Martin’s sake (whom I have always had reason to believe as much in love with her as ever), to get acquainted with her. I have often talked to her a good deal. You must have seen that I did. Sometimes, indeed, I have thought you were half suspecting me of pleading poor Martin’s case.”
Well, no; she was suspecting him of pleading his own. But happy happy joy joy, that’s all cleared up now, too. Emma’s really getting off scot free, isn’t she. The karma slot machine just keeps paying out for her.
What had she to wish for? Nothing, but to grow more worthy of him, whose intentions and judgments had been ever so superior to her own. Nothing but that the lessons of her past folly might teach her humility and circumspection in the future.
Mm-hm. Which will totally happen.
Though we’ve got to grant her a few significant changes. For instance, she’s now persuaded that “it would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin.” That’s right, the guy she wouldn’t deign even to look at when he was right in front of her, forty-odd chapters back. So, yeah, props to our homegirl for that.
She’s also genuinely happy to see Frank again, which happens in short order, on a visit to Randalls—where Frank and Jane are bothin attendance, giving Emma her first opportunity to see them together as a couple. She’s impressed by his genuine delight in his fiancée; and even more impressed when she gets a chance to compare notes with him on the course of their acquaintance. “But is it possible that you had no suspicion?” he asks her. “I mean of late: early, I know you had none.” Emma assures him she never had a clue he was secretly engaged.
“That appears quite wonderful. I was once very near,—and I wish I had; it would have been better. But though I was always doing wrong things, they were very bad wrong things, and such as did me no service. It would have been a much better transgression, had I broken the bond of secrecy and told you every thing.”
“It is now not worth a regret,” said Emma.
Frank also gets to answer Emma’s congratulations on his engagement by wishing her well with hers. “I assure you that I have heard the news with the warmest interest and satisfaction. [Mr. Knightley] is a man whom I cannot presume to praise.”
Emma might reply, “And you are a man whom Mr. Knightley cannot pretend to praise,” but she doesn’t because she’s a lady, remember?
But she’s not so much a lady that she lets Frank off the hook entirely. When he starts rhapsodizing about Jane’s fair complexion, Emma says, “[B]ut do not I remember a time when you found fault with her for being so pale? When we first began to talk of her. Have you quite forgotten?” He pretends to be appalled by the memory—he calls himself an “impudent dog”—but laughs “so heartily at the recollection” that Emma can’t resist going in for the kill.
“I do suspect that in the midst of your perplexities at that time, you had very great amusement in tricking us all. I am sure you had. I am sure it was a consolation to you.”
“Oh no, no, no!—how can you suspect me of such a thing? I was the most miserable wretch.”
“Not quite so miserable as to be insensible to mirth. I am sure it was a source of high entertainment to you, to feel that you were taking us all in. Perhaps I am readier to suspect, because, to tell you the truth, I think it might have been some amusement to myself in the same situation. I think there is a little likeness between us.”
This is the same girl who, a few pages back, crowed, “Oh! if you only knew how much I love every thing that is decided and open!” But it’s okay. We like that she’s a little bit full of bullshit. That’s our Emma. We don’t want her suddenly to become all linear and transparent, even (hell, especially) to herself.
We also don’t want Frank to change too much either, which doesn’t seem likely, as now he makes Jane blush by recollecting his “dream” about Mr. Perry’s carriage, and the “blunder” of having mentioned it aloud after learning of it by secret letter. Jane pretends not to hear him, but he knows it’s a sham and calls her on it, laughing all the while.
Eventually she turns and says, “How you can bear such recollections, is astonishing to me! They will sometimes obtrude: but how can you court them?” Frank, we’re told, “had a great deal to say in return, and very entertainingly”. We’re not worried about Frank and Jane. They’ve got exactly the right chemistry. They’ll be happy till the day they drop dead together (probably of exhaustion).
As will Emma and Knightley; and as will Harriet and Robert Martin, a fact of which Emma becomes “perfectly satisfied” after spending an hour with Harriet on her return to Highbury. She realizes with some degree of surprise that Harriet “had always liked Robert Martin; and that his continuing to love her had been irresistible.” Though to her, it still seems pretty cray-cray.
In the run-up to the wedding, Harriet’s parentage is revealed: she’s the daughter of a tradesman, “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment. Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for!” So, whaddaya know, another narrow escape for her. She could start scrapbooking them, at this point.
Emma’s and Harriet’s friendship now goes on the wane. “The intimacy between [them] must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of good-will; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual manner.” So much for that troublesome class mixing; whatever else our J.A. may be, democratic she ain’t.
Then come the weddings, and, as usual, Austen couldn’t care less. Harriet’s is first; and with the exception of a glance at Mr. Elton’s discomfort in officiating, it barely rates a mention. Jane Fairfax’s wedding isn’t mentioned at all; when the Campbells return from Ireland she goes off to be with them for the month of November, and that’s the last we hear of her.
But it’s Emma’s and Knightley’s march up the aisle that really counts. And how does our über-romantic author handle that?...Well, we get several paragraphs about how miserable Mr. Woodhouse is as the date draws near, until one night Mrs. Weston’s poultry-house is burgled of all its turkeys, and he becomes convinced that a pack of brigands is in the neighborhood so yes please Mr. Knightley do marry my daughter and come live with us, and bring seven or eight or twenty-five of your burliest friends too, and how does tomorrow sound?
With that out of the way, we finally get to the main event. Drumroll, please:
The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it.”
In short, the much anticipated wedding is no dizzying apotheosis, no grand climax to whirling emotions that have been building to a crescendo, no soft-porn cleaving of ripened heroine and tousle-haired hero; instead, it’s a chance to reward us with a unexpected curtain call from our favorite grotesque. That’s our J.A. That’s why we love her.
Emma is literary champagne; but of the very driest variety. In it, we find Austen at the height of her narrative powers, and clearly aware of it; she indulges herself—in fact, a bit too much so for my taste. She doesn’t make light of the world she creates; but she doesn’t exactly make heft of it, either. It’s a frolic—a gambol; a sunny roundelay. We love Emma, but we never feel any kind of anxiety for her, as we did for the Dashwood sisters, and for Lizzy Bennet. We never feel anxiety for anyonein the cast of characters. It’s as though Austen has invented such a group of darlings, she can’t bear to afflict them with any real tribulations. There is—as there always is, in Austen—a rival, and a cad; but the rival is never seriously a rival, and the cad only intermittently caddish. The book’s only two villains are married off to each other and pushed to the margins so that their hideousness can only delight, never threaten. In a way, Emmais Jane Austen writing her own Jane Austen fan fiction.
Her next novel will feature no darlings, and will plunge back into the acid seas of roiling social satire. So we may infer that Emmasated her thirst for leisurely idylls and sunny, sassy set pieces; and we can be glad of that. But we have no regrets; Emmahas been a lovely port of call on our cruise through her canon, and one we won’t mind revisiting…largely because of Emma herself. She’s intoxicatingly contradictory; maddeningly charming; sweetly insouciant. Austen sometimes named her novels after her heroines, but Emmais the only one whose title wasn’t changed before publication; because it couldn’t be. Emma is simply too central to be in any way sublimated. And not just to the novel; to the culture at large. She’s an icon—a prototype; the western canon’s first spoiled rich girl, the original ancestress of every brash young heiress who shows up in books or plays or movies radiating self-confidence and trailing furs. We see her everywhere, swaggering about sporting jodhpurs and a riding crop, or zipping down city streets in a convertible at 3 a.m., or kicking her shoes off and dancing on a private jet. Her lineage is always different, but her story is always the same: she meets the right man, and learns serenity. Well…it’s the 21st century, and feminism is no new thing anymore. But still we’re happy for her. We always will be.

Emma, chapters 49-51

The weather’s lousy, to match Emma’s mood; but she’s young, and resilient, and when the sky clears she “resolved to be out of doors as soon as possible” and to give that shrubbery another go. She’s immersed in its foliage, enjoying whatever therapeutic vapors it give off (maybe it’s a cannabis plant in full flower), when she spots you-know-who striding manfully toward her. “It was the first intimation of his being returned from London…There was time only for the quickest arrangement of mind. She must be collected and calm. In half a minute they were together.”
She’s startled to find him looking like high holy hell. She supposes this is because he’s told his brother of his plans to marry Harriet Smith, and it didn’t go well. Maybe John Knightley laughed at him. Or accused him of tarnishing the family name and threw an inkwell at him, or something.
They walked together. He was silent. She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view of her face than it suited her to give. And this belief produced another dread. Perhaps he wanted to speak to her of his attachment to Harriet; he might be watching for encouragement to begin.
In which case, he’ll be watching till about a week after the crack of doom, because Emma is totally not going there. She’d rather ditch him by the dogwood and just hide out on the grounds till the urge to speak leaves him…living on berries and nuts, if comes to it.
Instead she chooses the perhaps more expedient tack of simply changing the subject. “You have some news to hear, now you are come back, that will rather surprise you.” Actually, she’s the one who’s surprised, because he shoots back, “If you mean Miss Fairfax and Frank Churchill, I have heard that already.” Turns out he’s had “a few lines on parish business” from Mr. Weston, which included the happy news as a postscript. Emma’s relieved, and also a little abashed.
“Youprobably have been less surprised than any of us, for you have had your suspicions. I have not forgotten that you once tried to give me a caution. I wish I had attended to it—but (with a sinking voice and a heavy sigh) I seem to have been doomed to blindness.”
This is a refreshing admission, if a tad melodramatic (“doomed to blindness”—sweet creepin’ Jesus), but it has an entirely unexpected effect on Mr. Knightley, who draws Emma’s arm to him and presses it against his heart, and speaks “in a tone of great sensibility”, which in Austen means he speaks like one of those tunes where Johnny Cash talks instead of sings.
“Time, my dearest Emma, time will heal the wound…I know you will not allow yourself—“ Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent, “The feelings of the warmest friendship—indignation—abominable scoundrel!” And in a louder, steadier tone, he concluded with, “He will soon be gone. They will soon be in Yorkshire. I am sorry for her. She deserves a better fate.”
Emma quickly realizes what’s behind this—or rather, she thinks she does; she actually only gets about half of it. (We, of course, get the other half; but we’ve been about six miles ahead of her the entire length of the novel. Maybe “doomed to blindness” isn’t so far a reach. She could pretty much have it tattooed on her forehead.) And “as soon as she could recover from the flutter of pleasure, excited by such tender consideration,” she puts his mind at rest, reassuring him that while she regrets the way she let herself behave when Frank Churchill was around, and “was very foolishly tempted to say and do many things which may well lay me open to unpleasant conjectures,” she has no regret about learning the news of his engagement to someone else.
Mr. Knightley’s so happy, he does his version of the Snoopy dance, which is basically to stutter over a few sentences and then stoically regain control of himself. He admits he could never be entirely sure how much Emma’s feelings were invested in Frank; “I could only be certain that there was a preference—and a preference which I never believed him to deserve. He is a disgrace to the name of man.” Whoa, Big K.—take a deep breath, already. Count to ten. Heal.
Emma is confused by his vehemence, because hello?—everything’s fine now, remember?—so she reiterates, possibly speaking verrry slloooowly and with PRECISE ARTICULATION the way we do to small children or service people on I.T. help lines, that “I never have been at all attached to the person we are speaking of”. Possibly she writes Frank’s name in the dirt with a stick, then jumps up and down on it to illustrate her point.
Mr. Knightley still looks at her with an unreadable expression, so that she supposes she really has to bite the bullet and “lower herself” even further in his opinion, by explaining exactly what drove her peculiar relationship with Frank—which, as we know, is basically a combination of convenience, boredom, and I-am-queen-of-everything.
“…He was the son of Mr. Weston—he was continually here—I always found him very pleasant—and, in short, for (with a sigh) he let me swell out the causes ever so ingeniously, they all centre in this at last—my vanity was flattered, and I allowed his attentions…I thought them a habit, a trick, nothing that called for seriousness on my side. He has imposed on me, but he has not injured me.”
That’s what was behind her part in the performance; and now she finally understands what was behind his. “He never wished to attach me. It was merely a blind to conceal his real situation with another.”
Some time passes while all this sinks in. Then Knightley finally speaks, and it’s not the most charitable of outbursts.
“Frank Churchill is, indeed, the favourite of fortune. Every thing turns out for his good. He meets with a young woman at a watering-place, gains her affection, cannot even weary her by negligent treatment—and had he and all his family sought round the world for a more perfect wife for him, they could not have found her superior. His aunt is in the way. His aunt dies. He has only to speak. His friends are eager to promote his happiness. He has used every body—and they are all delighted to forgive him.”
Well, of course everyone forgives him. He’s a rogue and a liar, a creature of impulse, all appetite—but dayum, dude’s got charm. And besides, he doesn’t really mean any harm; he’s the scoundrel with a heart of gold, to borrow my terminology for Henry Crawford of Mansfield Park (itself borrowed from Robert Graves). Frank Churchill is Henry Crawford reincarnated—and this time given the proper ending. He gets his Fanny Price, to the inestimable advantage of both.
Emma takes note of the hint of snark in Knightley’s tone, and says, “You speak as if you envied him.” He replies, “And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy.” We all know where this is headed. We’d know it if we were reading it through the wrong end of a telescope. We’d know it if we were reading it in pig Latin. We’d know it is Austen dropped every third word and deleted the vowels from all the rest. We’ve known it since the first chapter, and seen it barreling towards us ever since.
But Emma, God love her, still doesn’t. The way she sees it, “They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet,” so she again tries to change the subject, but before she can ask about Isabella’s children, or the coach ride from London, or what did you have for breakfast or what’s your favorite Adam Sandler movie, he blurts out:
“You will not ask me what is the point of envy. You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity. You are wise—but I cannot be wise. I must tell what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment.”
Aaaaaand still Emma doesn’t get it. Apparently Knightley will have to write I LOVE YOU, MORON on a cricket bat and then kneecap her with it, before she’ll twig. As it is, still thinking this is all about Harriet, she begs him not to speak—“take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself.”
He thanks her in “an accent of deep mortification,” and looks so puppy-dog hurt that Emma changes her mind, and decides she’ll hear whatever he has to say, no matter how much it distresses her. So when they reach the house she proposes another hit off the shrubbery and they turn back the way they came. After a few steps she says, “I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain”, and she offers this time really, no kidding, to hear what he has to say, as a friend.
“As a friend!” he replies, again mortified, and Emma is probably wondering why she can’t seem to say one bloody thing right today. Then it all comes gushing out: it isn’t as a friend that he wants to confide in her at all. What he wants to say—wants to ask—is something quite different. “Tell me, then,” he pleads, “have I no chance of ever succeeding?”
Knowing Emma, she probably wonders, succeeding at what? Is he building a ship in a bottle or something? Because she’s heard those can be really tough. Then he makes it crystal goddam clear.
“My dearest Emma,” said he, “for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour’s conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma—tell me at once. Say ‘No,’ if it is to be said.”
Maybe not trusting herself after batting zero all afternoon, she clams up; and Knightley figures well, okay, it’s not a no, so he’s encouraged to go on. “I cannot make speeches, Emma,” he says, before launching into a pretty decent speech. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more,” he continues, as a preamble to talking about it more. “God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me,” he adds, before explaining himself anyway.
All the time he’s speaking, Emma’s “mind was most busy” with a “wonderful velocity of thought”, which is pretty much what she’s like on any given day, so it’s not that big a deal. But it turns out her first thoughts aren’t just of her own ecstatic, somersaults-and-cartwheels happiness, but of the inevitable let-down to Harriet, who seems to be well on her way to a career of not getting married to every man in Highbury, one at a time. But Emma can’t seem to summon up any regret that, where Knightley’s concerned, “Harriet was nothing; that she was every thing herself;” quite the contrary.
…[A]s to any of that heroism of sentiment which might have prompted her to entreat [Mr. Knightley] to transfer his affection from herself to Harriet, as infinitely the most worthy of the two—or even the more simple sublimity of resolving to refuse him at once and for ever, without vouchsafing any motive, because he could not marry them both, Emma had it not. She felt for Harriet, with pain and with contrition; but no flight of generosity run mad, opposing all that could be probable or reasonable, entered her brain.
And thank God for it. A few decades later, the Victorians would develop a thing for weepy, self-sacrificing heroines, but not yet. Here, we get to enjoy the sunny self-interest of one of literature’s most enchanting pragmatists, as she now happily consents to take receipt of everything she’s ever wanted.
What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. She said enough to show there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself.
Why do people love Jane Austen?...There it is, right there. Of the tortuous, calamitous, hilarious path to conjugal harmony, she’s indispensible. Her sparring, self-deluding, self-immolating lovers are the stuff of legend. But when they finally get to the point where they can look at each other across the blasted landscape of their battlefields, and see, finally see, that they were meant for each other all along…Austen loses interest. She proceeds in short, swift strokes. In accepting her true love’s proposal, Emma says “just what she ought.” Because “a lady always does.”
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 his.
This is why Hollywood has to mutilate her, when they adapt her. The clear-headedness, the sobriety, of her take on male-female relations, is so at odds with the vulgar appetite for oceans of feeling and hailstorms of exclamation points, that filmmakers feel compelled to put all that in—swamping the sparkling spareness of her prose with rapturous orchestral gravy, burdening the clarity of her vision with pealing bells, swooping camera angles, and sumptuous art direction.
But we cognoscenti, who have experienced her undiluted, on the page, know the real Austen, and we revere her for all the things Hollywood chooses to jettison: her astringency, her sly sense of subversion, her bracing lack of sentimentality. They’ll never get her; but it’s okay. We do.
From this point in the novel, Mr. Knightley and Emma are in complete accord. The differences between them are retroactively resolved, to the satisfaction of each. Knightley had been in love with Emma and jealous of Frank Churchill, and after the Box Hill nightmare had gone to London to try to forget her.
But he had gone to a wrong place. There was too much domestic happiness in his brother’s house; woman wore too amiable a form in it; Isabella was too much like Emma—differing only in those striking inferiorities which always brought the other in brilliancy before him, for much to have been done, even had his time been longer.
Note the things that sustain his love for Emma here: not passion; not desire; not desperate yearning; but amiability…affinity…”domestic happiness.” Our only hint of capital-R Romance—of the collision of primal personal feeling with the chaos of the natural world—is in the single line relating that he had “ridden home in the rain” to comfort her after hearing of Frank Churchill’s engagement. But on arriving he “heard her declare that she had never loved him…She was his own Emma, by hand and word, when they returned into the house; and if he could have thought of Frank Churchill then, he might have deemed him a very good sort of fellow.”
There’s no great thundering romance in any of this; just the sublimity of a comedy concluded—serenely, harmoniously. “[Emma] was now in an exquisite flutter of happiness, and such happiness, moreover, as she believed must still be greater when the flutter should have passed away.” We’ve laughed our fill; now we smile. Jane Austen, ladies and gentlemen; Jane Austen.
Of course, there are still more than a few narrative strands to tie up. First among them is Mr. Woodhouse. Emma’s resolution never to leave him hasn’t been abandoned; so she tearfully concludes that she and Mr. Knightley will have to have a very looooong engagement, concluding in matrimony only when Mr. Woodhouse is no longer there to give away the bride (which is just as well, as there are probably innumerable drafts in the church; if he were alive to do his duty, it would kill him).
Then there’s Harriet; which is, fortunately, a matter that can be settled more quickly. (Though the Mr. Woodhouse matter might be settled quickly, as well, if Mr. Knightley only had it in him to sneak into Hartfield one brisk autumn night and open all the windows.) Emma decides it’s best not to see her “little friend” for a while, and writes to tell her why; and then, to make up for the blow, vows to try to get her invited to Brunswick Square. “Isabella had been pleased with Harriet; and a few weeks spent in London must give her some amusement.” Maybe the novelty and variety of town will help Harriet get over her disappointment. Or something. Whatever. We’re not really worried about Harriet. We know a long-term memory is about the same as a gerbil’s.
Then there’s Frank Churchill. His promised letter to Mrs. Weston arrives, and that lady dutifully forwards it on to Hartfield…not realizing that anything to do with Frank and Jane Fairfax is now of zero interest to Emma.
She was in now in perfect charity with Frank Churchill; she wanted no explanations, she wanted only to have her thoughts to herself—and as for understanding any thing he wrote, she was sure she was incapable of it. It must be waded through, however.
So she opens the envelope and plunges in. The letter is, as might be expected, equal parts swagger and humility. He begs Mrs. Weston for forgiveness, but is already sure she’ll forgive him, because after all, he’s “been forgiven by one who had still more to resent.” And speaking of Jane, he goes on to explain that had she refused his offer of a secret engagement, “I should have gone mad.” (What madness would look like in Frank Churchill is an interesting question; he’s already as headstrong as a stallion, and as impulsive as a gibbon.) And what, he presumes Mrs. Weston to be wondering, did he think he had to gain in committing to this kind of subterfuge? “To any thing, every thing”, he replies. In other words, he wasn’t really thinkingat all; he was feeling. He adds:
If you need farther explanation, I have the honour, dear madam, of being your husband’s son, and the advantage of inheriting a disposition to hope for good, which no inheritance of houses or lands can ever equal the value of.
Hard to get more charming than that. Though it’s also pretty much the dictionary definition of “cheeky.” Frank in a nutshell. Undaunted, he jumps right into yet another humble set-up, with another charmingly arrogant payoff:
You will look back and see that I did not come [to Randalls] until Miss Fairfax was in Highbury; and as you were the person slighted, you will forgive me instantly: but I must work on my father’s compassion by reminding him, that so long as I absented myself from his house, so long I lost the blessing of knowing you.
Frank Churchill’s amazing silver tongue, ladies and gentlemen. He’s here all week. Try the Swedish meatballs.
As for his sins against Emma herself (and here you can imagine Emma, despite her initial resistance to reading the letter, sitting up in her seat a little), he acquits himself by insisting that “had I not been convinced of her indifference, I would not have been induced by any selfish views to go on.”
Amiable and delightful as Miss Woodhouse is, she never gave me the idea of a young woman likely to be attached; and that she was perfectly free from any tendency to being attached to me, was as much my conviction as my wish. She received my attentions with an easy, friendly, good-humored playfulness, which exactly suited me. We seemed to understand each other.
The fact that he’s right doesn’t make him any less wrong, if you know what I mean. Still, it’s hard not to like him. Even as you’re fantasizing about kicking him to the curb.
Frank also says, of his first fortnight’s visit, “[W]hen I called to take leave of [Emma], I remember that I was within a moment of confessing the truth, and I then fancied she was not without suspicion…She may not have surmised the whole, but her quickness must have penetrated a part. I cannot doubt it.” You have to wonder how Emma feels, this that; because of course her take-away from that encounter was that Frank had been preparing to confess his love for her. Her “quickness” isn’t anything of the kind; next to it, your average glacier seems full of pep.
Frank also ‘fesses up that he was the one who sent the pianoforte; then he spends a page or so rhapsodizing Jane, to the point you start to suspect he’s at least as much in love with the sound of his own voice as he is with her. When he comes to Jane’s “hasty engagement” with “that woman”—meaning Mrs. Smallridge—he halts in mid-sentence, then resumes with, “Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly, to recall and compose myself”, and reveals he’s been “walking over the country,” no doubt with the wind in his hair and the setting sun behind him, and regretting that movies haven’t been invented yet because damn it look at me.
He then details the crises that led up to the Mrs. Smallridge brouhaha. Jane didn’t like Frank’s attentions to Emma; for which he thought her “unnecessarily scrupulous and even cold.” On the morning of the strawberry expedition to Donwell Abbey, “every little dissatisfaction that had occurred before came to a crisis.”
I was late; I met her walking home by herself, and wanted to walk with her, but she would not suffer it. She absolutely refused to allow me, which I then thought most unreasonable. Now, however, I see nothing in it but a very natural and consistent degree of discretion.
And the next day, at Box Hill, when Frank fawned over Emma in a way even Emma started to get sick off, Jane “spoke her resentment in a form of words perfectly intelligible to me. In short, my dear madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, abominable on mine, and I returned the same evening to Richmond,” convinced that “I was the injured person, injured by her coldness, and I went away, determined that she should make the first advances.” Which she did…to Mrs. Smallridge. Whoops.
Frank had known of the offer, and of how pressured Jane was to take it by Mrs. Elton, “the whole system of whose treatment of her, by the by, has filled me with indignation and hatred.”
“Jane,” indeed! You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you. Think, then what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons, with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority.
Oh, snap. We’ve been waiting for someone to call out the Eltons, and this is a very satisfying passage. Anyway, Frank received a letter from Jane—received on the very morning of his aunt’s death—dissolving their engagement and saying they were never to meet again. He immediately wrote back to calm and reassure her of his devotion, but in all the confusion surrounding the bereavement the letter never got sent; it remained locked up in the charming idiot’s desk. He wondered why he didn’t hear from her “speedily; but I made excuses for her, and was too busy, and—may I add?—too cheerful in my views to be captious.” His candor really is disarming; that it’s meant to disarm is a little troublesome, but let’s not cavil.
When he finally did her from Jane, he was shocked; because it was in the form of a parcel containing all his letters to her. She asked that hers to him be similarly returned, and gave Mrs. Smallridge’s address—the first indication Frank had that this was her new plan for her future.
Imagine the shock; imagine how, till I had actually detected my own blunder, I raved at the blunders of the post. What was to be done? One thing only. I must speak to my uncle. Without his sanction I could not hope to be listened to again.
And we all know how happily that worked out…except for Frank arriving in Highbury filled with the good news, only to find Jane physically a wreck. And a wreck not wildly inclined to hear anything he had to say. “A great deal of very reasonable, very just displeasure I had to persuade away.” Well, after this letter, we know he’s the guy for the job.
Emma finishes reading with a little sigh of contentment; of course “every line relating to herself was interesting, and every line agreeable”, because hey, that’s Emma. But beyond that she thinks Frank’s done just a super job of making a case for himself, and “though it was impossible not to feel that he had been wrong, yet he had been less wrong than she supposed,” and if he entered the room right now, “she must have shaken hands with him as heartily as ever.”
But that’s Emma’s reaction, and she’s a comparatively soft touch. Her fiancé is a different story, and when he comes in Emma sits him down and makes him read Frank’s letter right then and there, despite his plea that he take it home and read it later (and return the next morning, no doubt, apologizing that before he could get to it, the dog ate it).
“It will be natural for me,” he says as he begins, “to speak my opinion aloud as I read. By doing it, I shall feel that I am near you,” which is a little mysterious, because, hey, he is near her. Any nearer and she’d be in his lap. But these are young lovers, fresh from their first oh-baby-you’re-mine’s, so maybe anywhere but the lap does seem like a distant shore. Anyway, Emma approves his proposal, and so do we, because we want to hear his running commentary. Which is replete with the usual Knightley snorts and grunts and harrumphs.
“Very bad—though it might have been worse. Playing a most dangerous game. Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal. No judge of his own manners by you. Always deceived, in fact, by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience. Fancying you to have fathomed his secret! Natural enough! his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others. Mystery—finesse—how they pervert the understanding! 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?”
Emma, who has…umm…neglected to tell him how she’s inadvertently whipped Harriet into an erotic fever over him, isn’t too keen about that last bit, so she just flaps her hands and says, “You had better go on”.
When he gets to the part about the pianoforte, he says, “A boyish scheme, indeed! I cannot comprehend a man’s wishing to give a woman any proof of his affection which he knows she would rather dispense with”. (That made me blink. Would Jane really rather have dispensed with the piano? Why? Maybe because it made her vulnerable to gossip. Or possibly because it was about three-and-a-half inches wider than any room in the Bates apartment.)
There are, however, some grudging admissions along the way, as when Knightley says, “I perfectly agree with you, sir…You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line.” And, “There is no saying much for the delicacy of our good friends, the Eltons”. Though in general, wading through the epic missive page by page by page by page—possibly he needs a shave by the time he finishes it—gradually wears him down. “What a letter the man writes!” he sighs as he flips over to page fourteen. When he’s finally finished, he just plain doesn’t have the energy left for moral outrage. He sets the letter aside with the observation that Frank, as cretinous as he is, appears “beyond a doubt, really attached to Miss Fairfax, and will soon, it may be hoped, have the advantage of being constantly with her, [thus] I am very ready to believe his character will improve”.
And that’s all the time he can spare for Frank Churchill (possibly ever again—Frank can live to a ripe old age and die surrounded by grandchildren, and Mr. Knightley will have no comment), because someone else is on Knightley’s mind: Mr. Woodhouse. He knows Emma will never leave her father, and if by some chance he were able to persuade her to, Mr. Woodhouse would likely go right round the bend, walling himself up in Hartfield and luring in small children at night who would never be seen again come light of day.
So his plan is simple: instead of a long engagement (because, *ahem*, the gentleman is ready now), and instead of relocating Emma to Donwell, Knightley himself will come and live at Hartfield, and what does Emma think of that scheme?
She was sensible of all the affection it evinced. She felt that, in quitting Donwell, he must be sacrificing a great deal of independence of hours and habits; that in living constantly with her father, and in no house of his own, there would be much, very much, to be borne with.
So yeah, she’s fine with it.
Actually, she promises “to think of it more;” but there’s never any real doubt she’ll gracefully allow it. It involves someone else making all the compensations for her own comfort and ease, so what’s the problem?...Similarly, she even has to laugh at herself as her former, vehement defense of her nephew Henry’s right to inherit Donwell now evaporates like beer foam.
Think she must of the possible difference [her marriage would make] to the poor little boy; and yet she only gave herself a saucy conscious smile about it, and found amusement in detecting the real cause of that violent dislike of Mr. Knightley’s marrying Jane Fairfax, or any body else…
So, there you go, little Henry. Off to the army with you. Or possibly the church. If there’s going to be an heir to Donwell Abbey, Emma will supply him. You can come and visit, though. Seriously, anytime. But…write first.
So everything’s settled. Or rather, almost everything. Because flitting at the margins there’s still…Harriet Smith. Emma’s most spectacular failure. She plucked the girl from nothing and promised her everything, and now everything she promised has gone to other women—including Emma herself. And Emma can’t even issue her any more pity invitations to Hartfield, because Mr. Knightley will be there, blaring a big red “rejection” light.
Of course Harriet will eventually get over him; “but this could not be expected to happen very early. Mr. Knightley himself would be doing nothing to assist the cure; not like Mr. Elton.” No, Knightley is unlikely to become a sneering villain to help turn Harriet’s love sour. Emma’s only hope is that Knightley is somehow supplanted. Though “really it was too much to hope even of Harriet, that she could be in love with more than threemen in one year.”
Notice that Emma doesn’t have anyone in mind for number four, or an active plan for bringing them together. We’re on page 430, for God’s sake, but at least she’s finally learned that lesson.

Emma, chapters 46-48

Ten days after the end of the previous chapter—which brought with it the news that Frank Churchill’s aunt had finally met the grim reaper (and probably scared him into an early retirement)—Mr. Weston shows up at Hartfield in a full-on spaz attack. He’s been sent to fetch Emma to Randalls, to see his wife on urgent, urgent business, really just the urgentest. Emma demands to know what exactly is going on, undoubtedly worried that Mrs. Weston’s hair may be on fire or something.
“Is she unwell?”
“No, no, not at all—only a little agitated. She would have ordered the carriage, and come to you, but she must see you alone, and that you know (nodding towards her father)—Humph! Can you come?”
Well, okay. We get that. The concepts “Mr. Woodhouse” and “urgent” cannot exist in the same room. The time-space continuum would warp out of shape or something. Anyway, Emma says of course she can come, and as she pulls on a pair of wellies and looks around for her house keys, she begs Mr. Weston to come on, just be a guy and tell her. And he’s all, “You will know it all in time. The most unaccountable business! But hush, hush!”
She tries again when they’re on the path from the house, tearing through the gates like a pack of raptors is on their tail. “Don’t ask me,” he says. “I promised my wife to leave it all to her. She will break it to you better than I can.” So, pretty much, for this one page alone, Mr. Weston has earned a slow death by spit-roasting.
Make that two pages, because Emma keeps on trying all the way to Randalls. But the only concession she gets from him is that maybe the phrase “break it to you” wasn’t the best choice of words. “I don’t say that it is not a disagreeable business, but things might be much worse. If we walk fast, we shall soon be at Randalls.” And if they pass a large hole, we shall see Emma push him into it.
Of course, not knowing the score just makes Emma’s imagination jump the shark. She imagines that maybe Frank is disinherited; possibly Mr. Churchill has “a dozen natural children,” which doesn’t really tally with what we know of him. If anyone had the verve for serial adultery in that marriage, it was the Mrs.—though her natural children would probably all be sired by the lord of hell, and as such have little interest in inheriting some meager acreage in England.
Finally they arrive—I picture Mr. Weston physically yanking Emma into the house, her hair pulled out of curl and possibly her bonnet lost to the wind some half a mile back—and she’s delivered into the room where Mrs. Weston sits waiting like the empress of Russia. And before Mr. Weston leaves, Emma hears him stage-whisper, “I have been as good as my word. She has not the least idea.” Workin’ it right to the end, there, Big W. We may need a goddamn hook to get you offstage.
This kind of suspense would have killed Harriet Smith stone dead about seven paragraphs back. Fortunately, Emma is made of sterner stuff. Which is a good thing, because when she asks Mrs. Weston to please now spill the bloody beans already, that lady manages to outdo even her husband by—are you ready for it?—asking Emma to guess. Seriously, they’re a pair of torturers. (I’m betting there’s a big suitcase under their marital bed filled with S&M gear. Whips, handcuffs, tit clamps. And Regency gimp masks with totally amazingneedlework.)
Emma, who’s recently learned the hard way to be always polite even if it freakin’ gives her the bends, plays along and ventures that it has something to do with Frank Churchill. Ding-ding-ding. Got it in one. “You are right,” says Mrs. Weston. “It does relate to him, and I will tell you directly”. Don’t you love people who say “I will tell you directly,” instead of—you know—telling you directly?
Then there’s a lovely moment as Mrs. Weston pauses, “resuming her work, and seeming resolved against looking up.” One of those illuminating character details that so vividly differentiate Austen from her imitators. Finally, stitching frantically away, she lets it out.
“He came to speak to his father on a subject,—to announce an attachment—”
She stopped to breathe. Emma thought first of herself, then of Harriet.
“More than an attachment, indeed,” resumed Mrs. Weston: “an engagement—a positive engagement. What will you say, Emma—what will any body say—when it is known that Frank Churchill and Miss Fairfax are engaged; nay, that they have been long engaged?”
What will Emma say?—Well, a variety of things, ranging somewhere between “Shut up,” and (twisting Mrs. Weston’s arm behind her, no doubt) “Take it back!”
But in fact it’s all true. “There has been a solemn engagement between them since October,” Mrs. Weston says (though how solemn it can be is arguable given the way Frank’s been disporting himself like Hugh Hefner on shore leave), “formed at Weymouth, and kept a secret from everybody…I can hardly believe it. I thought I knew him.”
Emma now finds herself in an extremely unenviable position, which many of us have encountered as well (I know I have). She suddenly realizes that Jane Fairfax is sure to have heard every single snarky thing she ever said about her, thanks to Frank blabbing it all in intimate moments. But give her credit: she’s just as concerned by what this news must mean to Harriet. Another romantic disappointment, so soon on the heels of Elton-gate! The poor kid will probably fling herself off a cliff. (Presuming Miss Woodhouse thinks it a good idea. I mean, Harriet’s bound to ask first.)
Thinking about romantic disappointment, Emma has another epiphany, and realizes exactly why she was bundled off to Randalls in such haste and secrecy. The Westons are afraid that she’s the one who’s going to fling herself from a cliff. Or the Emma equivalent thereof, which would be more like going on a tear of angry sarcasm so lethal, the whole of Highbury would go up in one big whoompf. So she immediately puts Mrs. Weston’s mind at rest, reassuring her that it’s been a loooong time since she had any designs on the contents of Frank Churchill’s well-tailored breeches.
Mrs. Weston is so relieved, she jumps up and kisses Emma. It’s the first kiss in the entire novel, and we’re on page 378. It’s probably the last kiss we’ll get, too. We have Hollywood to blame for larding Austen’s narratives with quivering lips, moist, yearning eyes, and furtive embraces, thus earning her the reputation of queen of turgid period romance. If Austen were alive today and making movies, she’d more Whit Stillman than Merchant & Ivory. (Hell, she’d be more more Judd Apatow than Merchant & Ivory.)
Anyway, while Emma’s happy to give Mrs. Weston peace of mind, she’s far less ready to let Frank off the hook. Oh hell, no. The man’s used her, and she’s just the kind of girl to repay use with abuse.
“What right had he to endeavor to please, as he certainly did—to distinguish any one young woman with persevering attention, as he certainly did, while he really belonged to another? How could he tell what mischief he might be doing?—How could he tell that he might not be making me in love with him? Very wrong, very wrong indeed.”
Mrs. Weston tries to get a word in edgewise, but unsuccessfully because Excuse me not finished yet.
“And how could she bear such behaviour? Composure with a witness! to look on, while repeated attentions were offered to another woman before her face, and not resent it. That is a degree of placidity, which I can neither comprehend nor respect.”
Mrs. Weston breaks in to make it clear that Jane didresent it. And in fact there’s been a lot of friction and frustration between the two lovers over the past few months, which most of us have already twigged to. But of course Emma has to have it all written down for her in a bound volume, then the volume thwacked upside her head.
Mrs. Weston now confesses that the troubles between Frank and Jane was so severe that “The present crisis, indeed, seemed to be brought on by them; and those misunderstandings might very possibly arise from the impropriety of his conduct.” Emma bridles at that word, “impropriety”—in her opinion, you might just as well call Napoleon “pushy.”
“Impropriety! Oh! Mrs. Weston, it is too calm a censure. Much, much beyond impropriety! It has sunk him—I cannot say how it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be! None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.”
And yet, thick-headed as ever, it doesn’t occur to her exactly who she’s describing here. She’s too busy ticking off new horrors. Such as poor Mrs. Smallridge—the woman who’s probably right now fitting out Jane’s room for for her arrival to take up her governess duties. Sorry, Mrs. Smallridge. Maybe you can repurpose that room into a zumba studio.
In fact, Mrs. Weston reveals, it was Jane’s acceptance of the job with Mrs. Smallridge—a decision she made privately, without telling Frank—that blew the lid off this clandestine can of worms. Frank’s discovery of it convinced him to go public at last, and do right by his woman before she hired herself out as a future Charlotte Brontë heroine. Frank has promised to write with even more extenuating explanations (I’ll just bet he has), and Mrs. Weston begs Emma to wait for his letter before trashing his name around town, or burning him in effigy on the village green. “Let us have patience. I must love him…I am sincerely anxious for its all turning out well, and ready to hope that it may. They must both have suffered a great deal under such a system of secrecy and concealment.”
Emma remarks that if so, he did a hell of a lot better job hiding it than she did. But never mind, she’ll agree not to rush to judgment; though she then delivers a line almost worthy of Mrs. Bennet: “I suppose we shall gradually grow reconciled to the idea, and I wish them very happy. But I shall always think it a very abominable sort of proceeding.” And then she manages—through a positively gymnastic feat of reasoning—to absolve herself of any guilt over the snide comments she made about Jane to Frank.
“Here have we been the whole winter and spring completely duped, fancying ourselves all on an equal footing of truth and honour, with two people in the midst of us who may have been carrying round, comparing and sitting in judgment on sentiments and words that were never meant for both to hear.—They must take the consequence, if they have heard each other spoken of in a way not perfectly agreeable.”
In other words, “If my rudeness hurt their feelings, it’s their fault.” She’s good at the ass-covering, our homegirl. Too bad Mrs. Weston spoils it by pointing out that her ass needs no covering of any kind, and oh yeah, snap.
Now, “Mr. Weston appeared at a little distance from the window, evidently on the watch.” Beautiful comic image. You have to wonder what he was expecting to find. Maybe Emma bashing up all his furniture, or both women on all fours, baying at the ceiling. At any rate, his wife gives him the all-clear and he gratefully zips back ‘round to the front of the house. While he’s en route, his wife begs Emma to go easy on the Frank-hating routine, for his sake, and to make him feel good about the match.
“It is not a connection to gratify; but if Mr. Churchill does not feel that, why should we? and it may be a very fortunate circumstance for him,—for Frank, I mean,—that he should have attached himself to a girl of such steadiness of character and good judgment as I have always given her credit for—and still am disposed to give her credit for, in spite of this one great deviation from the strict rule of right. And now much may be said in her situation for even that error!”
Surprisingly, Emma agrees; presumably because if she were in Jane’s situation, she’d consider anything short of murder to be fair play in getting herself out of it. And, if you factor in an aunt like Miss Bates, maybe even murder too.
When Mr. Weston appears, Emma congratulates him so handsomely that “he now only wanted time and persuasion to think the engagement no very bad thing.” And not much of either, apparently; because by the end of Emma’s visit, after the whole thing has been gone over several times with increasing enthusiasm, “he was become perfectly reconciled, and not far from thinking it the very best thing that Frank could possibly have done.” Short of walking in front of a speeding barouche, I guess.
So Mr. Weston’s feelings are safe. But…there remains Harriet. Emma is sufficiently self-aware to realize that a good part of her anger at Frank, is misdirection of her anger at herself. Yeah, he was a dirty yellow dog for the way he came on to her; but she was no worse in the way she shoved Harriet between them, like an offering on an hors d’oeuvres tray.
Poor Harriet! to be a second time the dupe of her misconceptions and flattery. Mr. Knightley had spoken prophetically, when he said once, “Emma, you have been no friend to Harriet Smith.”—She was afraid she had done her nothing but disservice.
Emma’s concern for Harriet pretty much tanks any fleeting sympathy she feels for Jane. After all, Jane’s just landed herself a five-hundred-pound marlin, while Harriet’s still sitting with on the dock with her rod and reel, serenely unaware that she has no actual bait. “[Jane’s] days of insignificance and evil were over.—She would soon be well, and happy, and prosperous.” Whereas Harriet would soon be unwell, unhappy, and preposterous.
And Emma fears this second disappointment will be worse, considering “the very superior claims of the object”—though Harriet maybe ought to take comfort that each time she’s rejected it’s by a better class of guy. Whatever her reaction, Emma feels she has to trigger it right now; Harriet needs to hear the sad news from her own lips, before it makes its way to her through the Highbury grapevine—which has been having an unusually rich harvest lately.
Emma finds it “almost ridiculous” that she’s on her way to perform the same service to Harriet, that Mrs. Weston has just performed for her: letting her know that the man she presumably loves is already taken. “The intelligence, which had been so anxiously announced to her, she was now to be anxiously announcing to another…Could the event of the disclosure bear an equal resemblance!—But of that, unfortunately, there could be no chance.”
Poor Emma. She still hasn’t realized that she’s phased into the Twilight Zone, and is now wandering through a land where everything she believes is the reverse of what’s true, and everything she attempts has the exact opposite result to what she intends. God help her if she tries to take a bath; she’ll end up hanging naked from the top of a tree.
As witness Harriet Smith, who blithely waltzes in to where Emma waits to greet her and says, “Well, Miss Woodhouse…is not this the oddest news that ever was?” And Emma has to blink, and ask for clarification of what news Harriet’s referring to, because obviously something new has happened—like, maybe Mr. Coles has built a carriage out of sandwich meat, or Miss Bates has taken a vow of silence. But oh, no. “About Jane Fairfax,” Harriet says, possibly with an audible duhin her voice.
“Did you ever hear any thing so strange? Oh!—you need not be afraid of owning it to me, for Mr. Weston has told me himself. I met him just now. He told me it was to be a great secret; and therefore, I should not think of mentioning it to any body but you, but he said you knew it.”
Emma is completely gobsmacked. She expected to reduce Harriet to quivering protoplasm with this news; but she finds that Harriet not only already knows it, but shows “no agitation, or disappointment, or peculiar concern in the discovery.” They might be talking about a lost bracelet, or the menu for tonight’s dinner.
A little round of conversational badminton ensues, with Emma eventually asking, but—but—but Harriet, weren’t you, y’know, actually in love with Frank Churchill? Which Harriet answers with a whoa, Frank Churchill? Ssssshyeah, as if.
Now Harriet is plenty agitated, and has to turn away from Emma and collect herself (though I’m pretty sure whenever Harriet collects herself, she misses several pieces). Then she turns back and gives it to Emma good and straight.
“I should not have thought it possible,” she began, “that you could have misunderstood me! I know we agreed never to name him—but considering how infinitely superior he is to every body else, I should not have thought it possible that I could be supposed to mean any other person. Mr. Frank Churchill, indeed! I do not know who would ever look at him in the company of the other.”
Slowly the veil is lifting from Emma’s eyes—and that’s saying something, because, as we’ve seen, this is a regular welder’s mask of a veil—and she realizes with horror whom Harriet is talking about. Can it be…does she really mean…Mr. Knightley?
Of course she does. Harriet’s astonished that Emma could think otherwise. It was 100% clear every time they spoke of him; though Emma, for her part, could swear that Harriet actually named Frank at least once. Well, maybe not named him, but…
“I am sure the service Mr. Frank Churchill had rendered you, in protecting you from the gipsies, was spoken of…I told you that I did not wonder at your attachment; that, considering the service he had rendered you, it was extremely natural:—and you agreed to it, expressing yourself very warmly as to your sense of that service and mentioning even what your sensations had been in seeing him come forward to your rescue. The impression is strong on my memory.”
And her memory’s not faulty. Only—this being Opposite-Land—what she’s remembering isn’t what she thought it was even then. Harriet in fact was referring to a different man and a different service—“of Mr. Knightley’s coming up and asking me to dance, when Mr. Elton would not stand up with me…that was the noble benevolence and generosity; that was the service which made me begin to feel how superior he was to every other being on earth.”
Emma now has an unpleasant epiphany—one of about nineteen she’s had since getting out of bed, and it isn’t even lunchtime—as she realizes that Harriet’s persistence in this pursuit of Mr. Knightley—her attachment to her attachment, if you will—is entirely Emma’s own doing. She’s been encouraging her every step of the way, while reassuring her that the difference in social rank doesn’t mean a damn thing. This is a lesson—perhaps the only lesson—that Harriet has learned well, as she proves when she parrots that, “if he does not mind the disparity, I hope, dear Miss Woodhouse, you will not set yourself against it, and try to put difficulties in the way. But you are too good for that, I am sure.”
Reeling, Emma gropes for ammo—and finds a nice, primed musket. That is to say, she remembers advising Harriet not to invest too much of her heart unless she gets some encouragement from the gentleman in question—some indication that he’s got just as much urge to merge with her, as she has for him.
But whoops, the musket misfires. Because when Emma asks whether Harriet has “any idea of Mr. Knightley’s returning your affection”, Harriet shoots back a you-betcha. Emma, we’re told, reacts to this by “meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes.” You might think she’s summoning up a psychic death ray or something, but no. It’s actually more alarming.
A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart…Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet’s having some hope of a return? It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!
Now she gets it. Now, when it’s probably too late. Now she finally sees “How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling, had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on!” Now she finally grasps the whole concept, when she’s also finally realizing that, in conducting affairs of the heart, you can’t just call do-overs. Even when you’re Emma Woodhouse.
Emma realizes she has to get the full scoop from Harriet, so she can judge whether the girl is delusional or not (hey, it’s possible; after all, Harriet is someone who basically falls madly, deeply in love with anyone she’s pointed at and given a shove towards). Emma needs to know whether Mr. Knightley has really, objectively, unarguably given Harriet some winks and cuddles on the sly. Because of this, “the wonderful story of Jane Fairfax, that was quite sunk and lost. Neither of them thought but of Mr. Knightley and themselves.” Poor Jane. You have to wonder what she’d have to do to actually hold anyone’s interest for more than a few pages. She’s just given Highbury its biggest scandal of the entire decade, possibly the entire reign, and Emma and Harriet are already, like, “Next.”
Emma’s task is not an enviable one. Trying to pull objective facts from a narrative related by Harriet Smith is a lot like trying to get baby chicks to march in lockstep. But in fact Harriet’s able to summon up quite a lot of evidence that Emma, in hindsight, has to agree is the goods. Right off the bat there are those “two decisive dances” with which Knightley rescued her from the Eltons’ hissing and spitting. And then there’s the cozy way the two of them went off together on strawberry day, and spent the morning happily à deux. Also, Knightley’s having sat with Harriet for half an hour at Hartfield before he left for London—ostensibly waiting for Emma to get back before he set out, though he’d originally claimed he couldn’t stay longer than five minutes. And then, of course, there’s the way he’s spoken of Harriet to Emma’s own ear, expressing his surprise that she’s really much more delightful a girl than he ever suspected, and talking to her isn’t at all like talking to an organ grinder’s monkey, and who knew?
Then Harriet—unknowingly—twists the knife. “I never should have presumed to think of it at first…but for you.” Yep, Emma has created her very own Frankenstein monster, and it’s gone clomping off on a rampage, carrying Emma’s ideal man away under one arm.
But this is where our Emma starts showing some real class. She’s obviously distraught and mortified, and would like nothing better than to rewind and erase Harriet from her life, if not from her planet (“Oh God! that I had never seen her!”), but she summons up all her courage and breeding and answers Harriet’s evidence like a real goddamn lady. “Harriet, I will only venture to declare, that Mr. Knightley is the last man in the world who would intentionally give any woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really does.” Granted, she’s leaving open the whole issue of possible misinterpretation; but her aim is principally to make Harriet feel better, and only minimally to do the same for herself.
Emma spends the rest of the day in a fit of desperate and increasingly despairing navel-gazing.
Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of humiliation to her…How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practicing on herself, and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!—She sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery—in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly…
You know you’re in sad shape when even the shrubbery fails you.
She spends some time reexamining her feelings for both Knightley and Frank Churchill. Why had she so aggressively flirted with the latter when she’s always recognized, at some level, that he was the inferior of the two? Why did she insist on ordering Taco Bell when there was chateaubriand on the menu?
With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of every body’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange every body’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing—for she had done mischief.
And mischief to the man she loves, worst of all. For Emma can’t but see Mr. Knightley’s hooking up with Harriet as anything but a federal-relief-scale disaster for both him and his reputation. “Such an elevation on her side! Such a debasement on his! It was horrible to Emma…to foresee the smiles, the sneers, the merriment it would prompt at his expense; the mortification and disdain of his brother, the thousand inconveniences to himself.” Which begins to make Harriet sound like a particularly virulent infestation of head lice. Emma strives hard to imagine what the hell he’s thinking, in turning to Harriet this way, but she realizes it wouldn’t the first time “for a man of first-rate abilities to be captivated by very inferior powers”, especially if those very inferior powers were laid out like a banquet for him by the man of first-rate abilities’ very good friend, Miss Woodhouse.
Likewise, Harriet would never have raised her hopes so high as to set them squarely on Mr. Knightley, had Emma not been behind her, clanging on cymbals to urge her on. “Who had been at pains to give Harriet notions of self-consequence but herself?...If Harriet, from being humble, were grown vain, it was her doing too.”
And the paradox is that Emma, from being vain, was now grown humble. “Harriet Smith might think herself not unworthy of being peculiarly, exclusively, passionately loved by Mr. Knightley. [Emma] could not. She could not flatter herself with any idea of blindness in his attachment to her. She had received a very recent proof of its impartiality”—that being, of course, his epic scolding of her on Box Hill…which she had endured with apparent sullenness and resentment. Emma realizes that Mr. Knightley has been watching over her for years, doing his best to guide her principles and shape her character, and she’s repaid all his efforts with juvenile irreverence…with brattishness.
Nearly all of Austen’s heroines find themselves, sooner or later, immersed in self-castigation and regret—the exceptions being Elinor Dashwood, who never does anything wrong, and Fanny Price, who never does anything, period—so we’re used to this kind of thing. What we’re waiting to see is the effect it has on her future behavior. Will it, as with Marianne Dashwood, launch her into a mania for self-improvement schemes? Or will it teach her, as it did Lizzie Bennet, to laugh at herself?
Neither, it seems. Emma now reveals that while she may be a lady, she’s still essentially a child. What she wants—allshe wants—is for things to go back to the way they were. If Mr. Knightley could only be safe from Harriet, that would do the job.
Let him but continue the same Mr. Knightley to her and her father, the same Mr. Knightley to all the world; let Donwell and Hartfield lose none of the precious intercourse of friendship and confidence, and her peace would be fully secured. Marriage in fact, would not do for her…Nothing should separate her from her father. She would not marry, even if she were asked by Mr. Knightley.
This is a particularly juvenile pathology; we’ve all seen it before (maybe even fallen prey it before). “I don’t want XYZ; but I don’t want anyone else to have XYZ, either.” This longing for things to remain unchanged—to stay forever in a womblike state—is Emma’s last hurdle before entering into full adulthood. She has to get over wanting to remain the most important woman in Mr. Knightley’s life, while simultaneously holding on to her virginity—as symbolically represented by her refusal to leave her father. She has to learn not to want to rule all of Highbury, or at least not to rule it from a position of authority cushioned by rank and protected by privilege, and unadulterated by a the greater of authority of anyone of a stronger mind than her own (i.e. a husband).
These desires are pretty unattractive ones; but Emma doesn’t lose her appeal for us, because we see her struggling against them. She can’t have what she wants; she’s got to grow up, to let go of her vanities and whims, and put someone else’s welfare before her own. In Mansfield Park, we saw Mary Crawford struggle in the same way, against her growing affection for Edmund Bertram—she had to fight against her arrogant aversion to being a cleric’s wife. This is another reason I call Emma an inversion of Mansfield Park; and a happy one at that, because Emma will ultimately succeed where Mary is not allowed to. (Though it helps that the thing Emma struggles with—losing Knightley to Harriet—turns out to be imaginary.)
If Emma’s going to work her way out of this, she needs space to do it in; so she writes to Harriet begging her not to come to Hartfield for a while, and hopes “that if a few days were allowed to pass before they met again, except in the company of others—she objected only to a tête-à-tête—they might be able to act as if they had forgotten the conversation of yesterday.” (Note that phrase “act as if”: Emma’s no fool.) Harriet, we’re told, “submitted, and approved, and was grateful,” which are basically her three superpowers, so no surprises there.
We then get a visit from Mrs. Weston, who’s just paid a call on her daughter-in-law-to-be and has come to tell Emma all about it, in the mistaken belief that the Frank-and-Jane brouhaha is still the most interesting thing in the world to her. But Emma in fact welcomes the distraction, and the chance to think about something besides Harriet Smith as matron of Donwell Abbey.
Mrs. Weston relates how she very cannily persuaded Jane to leave the apartment and take a drive with her. This removed the pair of them from the verbal battering of Miss Bates, who in her triumph over Jane’s good fortune now talks at twice the velocity and with three times the intensity as before, so that the nails and studs in the building’s frame have started to vibrate out of their fittings and the whole structure’s at risk of giving way at any moment.
Safe in the Westons’ carriage, Jane gradually overcame her embarrassment and self-consciousness and allowed Mrs. Weston to draw out the thoughts and feelings that had been “pent up in her own mind” all this time. “On the misery of what she had suffered, during the concealment of so many months…she was very energetic…and the quivering lip, Emma, which uttered it, was an attestation that I felt at my heart.” (Quivering lips must be some kind of female-to-female code; men witnessing a lower lip in the early stages, are more apt to do whatever they can to get three four counties way as soon as possible.)
Turns out Jane is so filled with self-recrimination that it’s a wonder she was able to sit in the carriage at all. She seemed coiled; as if ready at any moment to fling herself out beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic.
“Do not imagine, madam…that I was taught wrong. Do not let any reflection fall on the principles or the care of the friends who brought me up. The error has been all my own; and I do assure you that, with all the excuse that present circumstances may appear to give, I shall yet dread making the story known to Colonel Campbell.”
Hearing Mrs. Weston relate this, Emma realizes that Jane must actually, really, honest-to-God-no-kidding love Frank Churchill. How else could she have put up with this kind of nastiness for so brutally long a time? It’s a sobering thought, given how stupidly and childishly Emma herself toyed with the idea of loving Frank…and of all the times she fake-flirted with him in front of Jane.
This brings on a second—or is it eleventh?—unhappy epiphany. “I am afraid,” Emma confesses to Mrs. Weston, “that I must often have contributed to make her unhappy.” And Mrs. Weston excuses her by saying it was “innocently done,” though she must mean the sort of innocence of a small animal that hasn’t yet been trained not to bite. But Emma’s and Frank’s billing-and-cooing, especially as public as it was—they might just as well have stood at opposite ends of the high street and done it through megaphones—made Jane “captious and irritable to a degree that must have been—that had been—hard for [Frank] to bear.” Jane couldn’t bring herself to “make the allowances…which I ought to have done, for his temper and spirits” and for “that gaiety, that playfulness of disposition,” which were what attracted her to the big lug in the first place. (Not that he was making any allowances for her disposition and spirits. Just sayin’.)
All this is what eventually drove Jane to say, “Screw this,” and sign on the dotted line with Mrs. Smallridge. So that Frank had to come riding in on his great white horse like a knight in tarnished armor, and apologize for being such an ass and please could we still get married, c’mon, I really mean it this time.
As a result, Jane is now sufficiently restored to semi-sanity to have sent word via Mrs. Weston, thanking Emma for her recent offers of a carriage to Hartfield and arrow-root, and apologizing for reacting like Emma was proposing to abduct and poison her. Emma feels another several stabs of guilt, as she realizes that if she’d been half the friend to Jane Fairfax that she should’ve been—and that everyone expected her to be—she’d never have had the need to take Harriet Smith under her wing, and Harriet could’ve been happily popping out babies at Robert Martin’s farm by now. 
Also, if she’d been half the friend to Jane Fairfax she ought to have been, she would’ve known and loved Jane well enough not to fall prey to the temptation to gossip about her; “she must have been preserved from the abominable suspicions of an improper attachment to Mr. Dixon, which she had not only so foolishly fashioned and harbored herself, but had so unpardonably imparted”, an imparted to Frank Churchill of all people, which was pretty much as good as imparting it to Jane herself. It really is a kind of miracle Jane can bear to speak to her at all, even through an intermediary. If they were gentlemen instead of ladies, you’d imagine it’d be pistols at dawn.
So it’s a melancholy Emma we leave at the end of this chapter, as she looks ahead to the near future and sees not only her self-regard atomized, but her little circle of subjects essentially dissolving out of her reach. Mrs. Weston is pregnant, and her baby will naturally consume most of her time for several years to come; Frank Churchill will marry Jane Fairfax, and since it’s now pretty clear he only ever really came to Highbury to see her, they’re unlikely to return more than once or twice a year; and then there’s Mr. Knightley. With him married to Harriet, Emma will lose the intimate, everyday friendship of both—the way each would just pop in at Hartfield to sit down for a nice chin-wag. This is the worst loss of all, because it’s the one she’s engineered herself.
All that’s left is more bleak, wintry evenings with her father playing crashingly dull card games, and every ninety seconds being ordered by him to get up and stoke the fire higher because Pneumonia. That, and visiting Miss Bates to have every letter of Jane’s read aloud twenty-six times followed by a four-hour Foucauldian deconstruction of the text. 
I should say, that’s all that’s left, provided Emma’s creator has no more surprises in store for her. But we know Emma’s creator better than that, don’t we?

Emma, chapters 43-45

Up to now, Emma has been a lovely ramble of a novel. Our heroine is a winner—a feline plotter whose arrogance is beautifully undercut by her titanic cluelessness—and it’s been a pleasure to watch her confidently stride into cowpat after cowpat, then wonder how the hell did that happen as she miserably scrapes the bottom of her shoe.
But.
There hasn’t been much in the way of narrative tension. In Jane Austen’s earlier works we felt the friction of sense against sensibility, pride against prejudice, and passivity against activity. Here, we’ve been in a sort of pastoral idyll. A lot of it has been very funny, but nothing much is at stake. Emma’s heart is never in any real jeopardy—and while Harriet Smith’s may be, Harriet’s fate isn’t important enough to carry a novel. (Harriet’s fate isn’t important enough to carry a three-minute pop song.)
There is, of course, the matter of Emma and Mr. Knightley not realizing they’re made for each other; but since neither one of them is ever in any danger of ending up with anyone else (Emma only flirts with Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightley’s only romantic attachment—which is still to come—is entirely one-sided, and entirely imaginary), we feel no sense of urgency in the matter. Hartfield isn’t being foreclosed on, Mr. Woodhouse’s fortune is not being seized by an unscrupulous nephew, Mr. Knightley’s not being called away to fight the Gurkha War in Nepal…there’s no race against the clock, as there has been previously (to salvage Edward Ferrars’ fortunes, say, or Lydia Bennet’s honor, or save Tom Bertram’s life).
In short, there’s been nothing to inspire in us an eagerness—a need—to know what happens next…that state of anxiety so beautifully captured by the character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who says, “The tension is unbearable! I hope it lasts.”
This is more in the nature of an observation than a complaint. As a devotee of the novels of E.F. Benson, I’m fine with small-scale comedies of manners. And if Emma up to now has been a tempest in a teapot, at least it’s a Jane Austen tempest in a Jane Austen teapot.
I say all this because we’ve reached the crux of the novel—the chapters in which Austen decides to stir up her well ordered little pond and muddy its crystal-clear waters. It’s all finely etched riot—exquisitely calibrated chaos—but we have to pay attention to feel its impact. In fact, the largest blows are over before we begin to feel the damage they’ve done. Here Austen is retreating from the comedies of her forebears—the broadly played gut-busters of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens—and providing something that might be seen as more conventionally…well, female.
It begins on Box Hill. Unlike the strawberry-picking outing the day before, this excursion begins inauspiciously, and degrades from there.
Seven miles were traveled in expectation of enjoyment, and every body had a burst of admiration on first arriving; but in the general amount of the day there was a deficiency. There was a languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over.
The company immediately splits into parties—Mr. Knightley with Miss Bates and Jane; Frank Churchill with Emma and Harriet; and the Eltons on their own. Mr. Weston tries everything short of a lariat to draw them all together, but they separate as soon as his back is turned, like they’ve all got opposing magnetic charges.
Emma, for her part, is pretty much miserable. “She had never seen Frank Churchill so silent and stupid. He said nothing worth hearing—looked without seeing—admired without intelligence—listened without knowing what she said.” And since that’s pretty much a description of Harriet on her best days, Emma’s getting it from both sides at once. In fact we’re told she finds both her companions “insufferable.”
Things get better—for Emma, anyway; worse, for everyone else—when they finally sit down to rest. Frank Churchill, bored and restless, takes the opportunity to grow “talkative and gay,” and chooses Emma as his subject. “Every distinguishing attention that could be paid, was paid to her. To amuse her, and be agreeable in her eyes, seemed all that he cared for,” and she, of course, equally bored, eats it up with a spoon and asks for more, please.
She does this even though his attentions mean nothing to her; she does this even though she knows they’re both putting themselves at risk of gossip.
“Mr. Frank Churchill and Miss Woodhouse flirted together excessively.” They were laying themselves open to that very phrase—and to having it sent off in a letter to Maple Grove by one lady, to Ireland by another.
And in fact the two ladies in question aren’t at all happy with the endless glorification of Emma. Mrs. Elton’s hackles are raised because she’s been under the impression (furnished by no one other than herself) that she’s the guest of honor today (“Lady Patroness,” as she referred to herself last chapter). She draws herself up in such lofty indignation that the top of her head almost disappears into a cloud. As for Jane Fairfax…well, we’re beginning to suspect that Frank’s worshipful tributes to his hostess are at least as much intended to irritate Jane, as to celebrate Emma. In which case, mission bloody well accomplished.
So it’s a complicated sort of misery we’ve got going on here. It’s hot and muggy, everyone’s tired and uncomfortable, and here’s Frank Churchill at his most grandstanding, going for the Olympic gold in the 50-meter blowhard and forcing everybody to keep pace with him. And Emma—bored, itchy, and cranky—allows him to keep laying on the compliments with a trowel, because Who’s Queen.
Not that Emma was gay and thoughtless from any real felicity; it was rather because she felt less happy than she had expected. She laughed because she was disappointed…
There are some pretty funny moments in all this, as when Frank trumpets “Ladies and gentlemen, I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse (who, where ever she is, presides,) to say, that she declares to know what you are all thinking.” A few of the company submit to some degree or other (Miss Bates, we’re told, “said a great deal”), but Mrs. Elton refuses and throws a really wonderful fit of pique.
“It is a sort of thing…which I should not have thought myself privileged to enquire into. Though perhaps, as the chaperon of the party—I never was in any circle—exploring parties—young ladies—married women—”
Her mutterings were chiefly to her husband; and he murmured, in reply,—
“Very true, my love, very true. Exactly so, indeed—quite unheard of—but some ladies say any thing. Better pass it off as a joke. Every body knows what is due to you.”
Since that plan didn’t go well, Frank pounces upon a new one, proclaiming that Miss Woodhouse “only demands from each of you, either one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeated; or two things moderately clever; or three things very dull indeed; and she engages to laugh heartily at them all.” Really, you just want to slap Frank across the face with a five-pound mackerel in this chapter. Am I right?
Hearing this new command, Miss Bates says, “‘Three things very dull indeed.’ That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, sha’n’t I?”
And thus we come to the moral and ethical nadir of the novel.
Emma could not resist.
“Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to the number,—only three at once.”
Emma—coarsened by privilege, deadened by praise, grown irritable from ease—has let loose the full lethal potential of her drone-like wit, and Miss Bates is the unfortunate casualty. We cringe as we watch the victim reel from the attack.
“Ah! well—to be sure. Yes, I see what she means (turning to Mr. Knightley), and I will try to hold my tongue. I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.”
But Austen, astringent as ever, only glances over this; she then immediately puts Mr. Weston center stage, or possibly he just grabs it of his own initiative, because a command to say one very clever thing is just the sort of prompt he’s been waiting forty years for, and he’s got a whole repertoire to choose from.
But alas, he’s the only one with any enthusiasm for the challenge, and in fact as soon as he’s finished Mrs. Elton grandly and energetically shuts the whole thing down.
“These kind of things are very well at Christmas, when one is sitting around the fire; but quite out of place, in my opinion, when one is exploring about the country in summer. Miss Woodhouse must excuse me. I am not one of those who have witty things at every body’s service. I do not pretend to be a wit. I have a great deal of vivacity in my own way, but I really must be allowed to judge when to speak, and when to hold my tongue. Pass us, if you please, Mr. Churchill. Pass Mr. E., Knightley, Jane, and myself. We have nothing clever to say,—not one of us.”
I love, love, love how Mrs. Elton demands that she be “allowed to judge when to speak, and when to hold my tongue,” then immediately denies three other people—including Mr. Knightley—the same right, by making that decision for them. She’s such a brazenly uproarious monster…absolutely unrelenting. Forget Godzilla; she could raze Tokyo in an afternoon, just by talking at it.
Apparently I’m not the only one to think so, either, as Frank Churchill says—after Mrs. Elton has stalked off, Mr. E trailing behind her like a vestigial tail—“Happy couple!...how well they suit one another! Very lucky—marry as they did, upon an acquaintance formed only in a public place! They only knew each other, I think, a few weeks in Bath!” And then he goes on in a borderline crazy-man way about how bad a place Bath is for making any judgments about marital prospects. “How many a man has committed himself on a short acquaintance, and rued it all the rest of his life!” he concludes, and you can sense the rest of the party sort of quietly edging away from him, clearing their throats and murmuring things like, Um…right, whatever you say. Anyone for cake?
But then Jane takes him on, offering a very quiet but firm counter-argument, and we realize, Oh, it’s just these two again. How many conversations has Frank had with Jane, that he’s conducted entirely through other people?...Really at this point you begin to wonder why the novel isn’t called Jane Fairfax, because it’s pretty clear that her story is quite a bit more fraught with consequence than Emma’s, and that for her at least, very, very much is at stake. We’re not sure exactly what, because Jane’s story isn’t just subtext, it’s goddamn subterranean text. Austen relates the whole thing not through narrative, but through implication.
Frank, twisting the knife, now concludes his argument by saying that he has no confidence in his own judgment, and hopes someone will choose his wife for him. He then turns to Emma and asks her to do it. “I am sure I should like any body fixed on by you. You provide for the family, you know (with a smile at his father). Find somebody for me. I am in no hurry. Adopt her; educate her.”
Emma’s tickled pink by this, because she’s pretty sure Frank’s got the same girl in mind that she does. That little zinger of “educate her” can only point to Harriet. (I imagine Harriet’s education to begin with simple commands like “sit,” “stay,” and “heel.”)
As for Jane, she packs up her aunt and decamps. And when she’s gone, Frank Churchill’s spirits rise “to a pitch almost unpleasant. Even Emma grew tired at last of flattery and merriment,” and she starts strategizing ways to get away from him, to walk quietly by herself, or to hide behind a shrubbery if it comes to that. But she’s saved by the servants coming to tell everyone the carriages have come to fetch them; the excursion is over.
Because of the bizarre currents of the Frank-Jane dynamic that have played such havoc with the day’s equilibrium, Emma hasn’t really given a thought to the epic way she snarked on Miss Bates—and the fact that no one else has made mention of it either has allowed it to slip her mind fairly easily. But now, as she heads to her carriage, Mr. Knightley appears next to her and lets her have it with both barrels. “I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not thought it possible.”
Emma’s taken aback by this attack, and tries to laugh it off with, “I dare say she did not understand me.” Mr. Knightley won’t let her play this get-out-of-jail-free card; he informs her that Miss Bates, far from not understanding her, has spent most of the afternoon talking about the incident—“honouring your forebearance, in being able to pay her such attentions…when her society must be so irksome.”
Emma’s on the ropes now, and panics a bit. “I know there is not a better creature in the world,” she says: “but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.” And that’s when Mr. Knightley goes in for the take-down.
“They are blended,” said he, “I acknowledge; and, were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave her every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case…You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour,—to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.”
He concludes by hoping that “you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now.” Emma is so mortified she can’t even look at him; and it’s only when she’s safely in her carriage, “sunk back for a moment overcome”, that she realizes how her non-response must look to Knightley, and kicks herself for “having taken no leave, making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness”—and she calls out the window to him, but he’s beyond hearing (which, since we’re only talking a few moments here, means either Emma’s voice is girlishly demure, or Knightley’s taken the opportunity to practice his sprint for the parish gymkhana).
Emma’s pretty wrecked by the encounter. She’s spent the best part of the novel looking to reprise her victory in pairing up Mr. and Mrs. Weston, and now she finally gets some evidence of the strength of her influence, but it’s in entirely the wrong direction. Too bad she lives 150 years before the flowering of Marvel Comics, because she could’ve benefitted from Spider-Man’s famous epiphany: “With great power comes great responsibility.” (Apparently Voltaire said it as well, but in French so it doesn’t count.)
Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of (Knightley’s) representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, of common kindness!
She’s lucky, though. In our century, lots of Emma-types make similar social gaffes, but do it in Facebook postings that inevitably go viral. Emma’s shame is at least confined to a relatively small group of people, all of whom can be easily bumped off if need be.
She spends the rest of the day wallowing in her guilt, reliving the morning and finding it “more to be abhorred in recollection, than any she had ever passed. A whole evening of backgammon with her father was felicity to it.” Which is really saying something. Next to an evening of backgammon with Mr. Woodhouse, I imagine periodontal surgery would be a felicity.
But Emma makes one resolve: she’ll make it up to Miss Bates. Oh, yes, she will. “If attention, in future, could do away the past, she might hope to be forgiven…In the warmth of true contrition, she would call upon her the very next morning, and it should be the beginning, on her side, of a regular, equal, kindly intercourse.” Great idea. Because right now what Miss Bates is obviously dying for is to see lots more of Emma.
As if to illustrate the point, after Emma is admitted to the Bates house the next day and is climbing the stairs, she hears “a bustle on her approach: a good deal of moving and talking…something was being done in a hurry; the maid looked awkward and frightened”. And then Emma enters, just in time to catch both Miss Bates and Jane fleeing into the next room. A moment later she hears the former say, “Well, my dear, I shall say you are laid down upon the bed, and I am sure you are ill enough.”
This is a wince-inducing scene, but Austen, whose muse is ever comic, doesn’t neglect the laugh-inducing grace note: “Poor old Mrs. Bates, civil and humble as usual, looked as if she did not quite understand what was going on.” Mrs. Bates has spent most of the novel not quite understanding what year it is, or who’s king, or what’s a king anyway, so yeah, it works. But she rallies enough to hope Emma can find a chair—leading us to wonder whether Miss Bates and Jane took all the available ones with them when they fled, as a kind of hint to Emma on how long she should stay. If they had a dog, they might even sic it on her.
Miss Bates soon appears, looking and seeming as gracious (and loquacious) as always, but “Emma’s conscience told her that there was not the same cheerful volubility as before,—less ease of look and manner.”
She inquires after Jane, hoping to improve things, and “The touch seemed immediate.” Miss Bates is immediately propelled into one of her saga-length soliloquies on Jane and Jane’s great nobility in her suffering; but she also makes mysterious references to things like how “it will be very trying for us to part with her, after having had her so long”, and “When one is in great pain, you know one cannot feel any blessing quite as it may deserve.” From which Emma eventually infers that Jane has finally accepted a position somewhere, and will soon be moving on to fill it.
One thing that doesn’t need inferring, though, is Jane’s unwillingness to see Emma. She’s claimed to be too ill to see anyone, but as Miss Bates prattles on it turns out she’s made an exception for Mrs. Cole. Emma gets that “Jane might very naturally resolve, on seeing Mrs. Cole, or any other steady friend, when she might not bear to see herself.” But she’s moved to pity by Jane’s fate (especially after learning her new situation will be only four miles from Maple Grove), and to remorse by the way she herself has treated her (especially after learning that she and Miss Bates were invited to dinner at the Eltons the night before; when Mrs. Elton treats someone better than you do, there’s cause for concern right there). And, to match her resolve to be more attentive to Miss Bates, Emma now adds a vow to be a better friend to Jane in her final two weeks in Highbury.
Emma also learns that Frank Churchill made a hasty return to Richmond after the Box Hill excursion, at the request of a messenger from his aunt. Though there seemed to be no real urgency in the request, Emma is still disturbed by it. After all, when someone spends an entire morning bleating about how you’re the super-specialest boss of everyone in the universe and bow down before her you common people you, you don’t expect him to go spiriting himself away in the afternoon without even a tip of the hat or a “Later, gator.”
For our part, we’re wondering whether Frank’s hasty departure is due to the same cause as Jane’s sudden decision to give in to Mrs. Elton and take the job she found her. Both Frank and Jane have been visibly irritable and out-of-spirits for two days now—at both the Donwell strawberry bash and the Box Hill debacle—and now both have pretty much bailed on Highbury, each lighting out in opposite directions. We see this; Knightley has seen it all along; yet Emma still doesn’t. How the girl doesn’t spend her days walking smack into walls, I don’t know; she’s clearly incapable of making out what’s right in front of her kisser.
And now that Frank’s gone and Jane’s going, Knightley jumps on the bandwagon and abandons ship (which makes for a particularly energetic, if problematic, mixed metaphor). Emma returns home from seeing Miss Bates to find him there, having come to take his leave (see, Frank, that’show it’s done) before heading to London to visit John and Isabella for a few days.
Emma has spent the last few pages hoping she’d run into Knightley so she could show him how contrite she is for the whole Box Hill imbroglio, and now that she has her chance it’s too late—he’s going away. “Emma was sure he had not forgiven her; he looked unlike himself. Time, however, she thought, would tell him that they ought to be friends again.” Fortunately for her, Mr. Woodhouse puts that plan on fast-forward by announcing to his guest that Emma has been out visiting Mrs. and Miss Bates. “She is always so attentive to them.”
Emma’s colour was heightened by this unjust praise; and with a smile and shake of the head, which spoke much, she looked at Mr. Knightley. It seemed as if there were an instantaneous impression in her favor, as if his eyes received the truth from hers, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured. He looked at her with a glow of regard.
It’s been a while since I’ve noted how little actual romance is to be found in the novelist credited by so many as a founder of the genre. This scene under discussion is about the closest Emma’s love couple has come to anything resembling strong feeling, and it’s all about character and integrity, not wild, headlong passion. And then we get this:
He took her hand;—whether she had not herself made the first motion, she could not say—she might, perhaps, have rather offered it—but he took her hand, pressed it, and was certainly on the point of carrying it to his lips—when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go. Why he should feel such a scruple, why he should change his mind when it was all but done, she could not perceive. He would have judged better, she thought, if he had not stopped. The intention, however, was indubitable; and whether it was that his manners had in general so little gallantry, or how ever else it happened, but she thought nothing became him more. It was with him, of so simple, yet so dignified a nature. She could not but recall the attempt with great satisfaction. It spoke such perfect amity.
“Perfect amity.” Austen—as I’ve said often before, I know, and forgive me, but it does bear repeating—was a daughter of the Englightenment. For her, the basis for conjugal happiness wasn’t what it would be for the Romantics who followed her. Friendship, propriety, and mutual respect were vastly more important, in the long run, than the torrents of unchecked emotion that drove later lovers like Heathcliff and Cathy. And Emma doesn’t offer a world of suppressed feeling, furtive desires, or longing glances across candlelit dinner-tables. It gives us thisworld, where the highest regard the hero shows for the heroine, is his approval of her atonement for having let him down; and which approval takes the form of something that’s meant to be, but isn’t quite, a kiss.
With that out of the way, Austen moves easily back into comedy, and Mr. Woodhouse’s reaction to Jane Fairfax’s brand-new employment. “You know, my dear, she is going to be to this new lady what Miss Taylor was to us. And I hope she will be better off in one respect, and not be induced to go away after it has been her home so long.”
But, still fresh as it is, we’re not allowed to linger over Jane’s news, because a report of an even more gobsmacking event now reaches Highbury, where it rips through the streets like a twister: Frank Churchill’s aunt has died. This occasions one of Austen’s most blisteringly misanthropic passages:
Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill fame.
The event also seems to vindicate her years of complaining about her health, and to humble everyone who ever sniffed at the idea that there was anything wrong with her at all. (Yes, Mr. Weston, we’re talking about you. You can just come out from behind that chair and face it like a man.)
Everyone’s thoughts turn naturally to Frank, because it pretty much pulls the stops from anything he might now want to do. The aunt’s authority was the only thing keeping him in check (and only barely, at that), and now she’s out of the way. (The surviving uncle, it seems, has about as much authority as a small, caged parrot.) Emma immediately sees the advantage to Harriet; the aunt would probably have objected to Frank marrying a li’l bastich chile; but now he can marry five or six in a row, if it blows his skirt up.
Emma’s sure the same thought must be occurring to Harriet, but if so, she seems to be taking it uncharacteristically well. Instead of going into a dithery, fluttery panic and being all oh Miss Woodhouse what shall I do how shall I feel please counsel me advise me chew my food for me, she just goes serenely about her business, not even seeming to be all that interested in the particulars of the old lady’s demise.
Emma was gratified to observe such a proof in her of strengthened character, and refrained from any allusion that might endanger its maintenance. They spoke, therefore, of Mrs. Churchill’s death with mutual forbearance.
And what of Jane Fairfax?...Hard to say. Emma can’t get close enough to make an independent judgment. She sends Jane an invitation to spend a day at Hartfield, and a servant is sent to reply, “Miss Fairfax was not well enough to write”. Then Mr. Perry, seemingly the only physician in the county, reports that she’s suffering severe headaches and will likely be unable to depart for her new situation at the appointed time. He is, he admits, “uneasy about her…Her spirits seemed overcome. Her present home, he could not but observe, was unfavourable to a nervous disorder”—one of the novel’s more massive understatements. As we know all too well by now, Miss Bates’s nonstop jabbering could turn the Buddha into a rooftop sniper.
This news just fires up Emma’s resolve to rescue Jane from her toxic environment. She offers to send a carriage at whatever hour Jane names, to bring her to Hartfield, and adds that the plan has Mr. Perry’s seal of approval. The response: “Miss Fairfax’s compliments and thanks, but is quite unequal to any exercise.”
Emma allows herself a moment for a brief snit—“her own note had deserved something better”—then renews the assault, ordering up a carriage anyway and taking it to Jane’s front door. Miss Bates comes down bearing thanks and apologies; Jane can’t take her up on the generous offer—in fact “the mere proposal of going out seemed to make her worse.”
Emma wished she could have seen her, and tried her own powers; but, almost before she could hint the wish, Miss Bates made it appear that she had promised her niece on no account to let Miss Woodhouse in. “Indeed, the truth was, that poor dear Jane could not bear to see any body—any body at all—Mrs. Elton, indeed, could not be denied—and Mrs. Cole had made such a point—and Mrs. Perry had said so much—but, except them, Jane would really see nobody.”
Emma swallows her pride and rides immediately away, lest she run the risk of hearing that Jane also made an exception for the butcher, the mayor, and both houses of Parliament; and anyway, she’d rather not be “classed with the Mrs. Eltons, the Mrs. Perrys, and the Mrs. Coles, who would force themselves any where”. Instead she goes home, finds “some arrow-root of a very superior quality” and sends it on to Jane for her comfort; only to have it returned with “a thousand thanks from Miss Bates” (I’m sure this isn’t hyperbole) and a reassurance that Jane, in her own words, “was not at all in want of any thing.”
It’s not until she hears later that Jane, who’s claimed to be too stricken for any activity beyond eye-blinking in Morse code, has been seen “wandering about the meadows,” that Emma finally twigs to what should have been apparent all along: “that Jane was resolved to receive no kindness from her.” And it’s not too hard to determine why: in addition to Emma having slighted her pretty much the entirety of their lives, Jane was also right there on Box Hill to hear Emma’s nasty slur on her aunt.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that in many respects Emmais an inversion of Mansfield Park, with Jane Fairfax as a new incarnation of that novel’s heroine, Fanny Price; and it’s in this passage that we can see the resemblance most clearly. Fanny Price never forgave anybody anything; she had, as I pointed out in my analysis of that novel, a heart of stone. Jane Fairfax’s refusal to forgive Emma, even to the point of not accepting a single kindness from her, is pure Fanny. And while we can certainly understand the motives behind it, we don’t like her for it.
Emma, at least, has “the consolation of knowing that her intentions were good”, and of knowing that Mr. Knightley would say so as well.
She’s going to need consolation, too, as things continue to go south for her, starting in the very next chapter. For many, many pages we’ve watched as Emma made her bed; now we’ll watch her writhe in it.

Emma, chapters 40-42

Alas, it turns out Austen is just jerking our chains. She’s promised to deliver the Sucklings, and by the time we realize she isn’t going to—that they, like Frank Churchill’s ghastly, hypochondriac aunt, are fated to remain offstage presences, monsters of the remote variety—we’re naturally disappointed, yet not so much so as we might be. Because Austen, unpredictable as ever, takes us by the nose and leads us in some surprising new directions—delving deeper into her present cast, rather than expanding it with new additions.
The first bit of business involves Harriet, who shows up at Highbury carrying a small parcel and displaying “a seriousness in [her] manner which prepared [Emma], quite as much as her words, for something more than ordinary.” The words in question are about Mr. Elton.
“I can see nothing at all extraordinary in him now. I do not care whether I meet him or not, except that, of the two, I had rather not see him; and indeed I would go any distance round to avoid him…”
Hilarious contradictions like this always remind me of the wildly comic juvenile Jane Austen. Nice to know she still has it in her.
Harriet refers to the parcel she’s bearing, declaring that she’s come to destroy “what I ought to have destroyed long ago”, and must do so in front of Emma so that she’ll be a witness to how serious and grown-up and empowered she is, though also probably because Harriet’s not allowed to play with fire without supervision. I picture her accidentally setting her petticoat ablaze, if not her hair.
“Cannot you guess what this parcel holds?” she asks Emma, and Emma replies she sure as hell can’t, unless it’s gifts from Mr. Elton, which she considers unlikely. Mr. Elton might consent to give Harriet head lice, but not much else.
She held the parcel towards her, and Emma read the words “Most precious treasures” on the top. Her curiosity was greatly excited. Harriet unfolded the parcel, and she looked on with impatience. Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty little Tunbridge-ware box, which Harriet opened: it was well lined with the softest cotton; but excepting the cotton, Emma saw only a small piece of court-plaister.

“Now,” said Harriet, “you must recollect.”
In fact, you could put a gun to Emma’s head and she couldn’t tell you. Harriet’s compelled to remind her of the time Mr. Elton cut his finger on Emma’s new penknife, and Emma recommended a court-plaister (a kind of Regency Band-Aid) but Emma herself was fresh out. So Harriet furnished one, but it was the wrong size, so Mr. Elton cut out what he needed and gave the rest back to Harriet, and voila!—a fetish object was born.
And a particularly pathetic one, too, give that it’s not a fetish once owned or possessed or worn by the beloved, but one he didn’t need or want, and returned to sender. Harriet’s descent into perversity is off to a rather wan start.
Suddenly Emma remembers the day in question, and also recalls that she had plenty of court-plaister of her own, but foxily pretended not to, so that Harriet would be the angel of mercy riding to the rescue of Mr. Elton and his wounded finger.
“Oh! My sins, my sins!—And I had plenty all the while in my pocket! One of my senseless tricks. I deserve to be under a continual blush all the rest of my life.—Well (sitting down again), go on: what else?”
Harriet has rather better luck with her second fetish, which is “the end of an old pencil”—not anything more glamorous, I know, but at least this was something Mr. Elton actually owned and used before discarding it. Of course there’s a story behind it, which Harriet recalls in minute detail and relates with all the zeal of a priestess invoking a creation myth.
“[H]e wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-book; it was about spruce beer. Mr. Knightley had been telling him something about brewing spruce beer; and he wanted to put it down; but when he took out his pencil, there was so little lead that he soon cut it all away, and it would not do, so you lent him another, and this was left upon the table as good for nothing. But I kept an eye on it; and, as soon as I dared, caught it up, and never parted with it again from that moment.”
Emma now finds she remembers this particular event, too, and in fact she seems to be entering into the spirit of things a tad too enthusiastically. I wonder if male readers will think she’s lost her mind. Fortunately, I grew up with female siblings, so I know teenage girls’ predilection for this kind of behavior. In fact one of my sisters made a little reliquary out of construction paper, where she kept a used milk carton and some greasy wax paper abandoned at the school lunch table by the object of her adoration. Possibly at night she lit candles before it, and swayed and chanted monosyllabically. If so, it didn’t work. He went to prom with someone else.
Emma asks Harriet to show her the next object, but guess what—that’s it. That is the full extent of Harriet’s “most precious treasures.” Really, someone should just grab a shotgun and take her out behind the shed. Be doing her a favor.
“My poor dear Harriet!” Emma cries, “and have you actually found happiness in treasuring up these things?” Harriet admits that yes, “simpleton as I was!”, she did, but now she will find happiness in burning them, and when Emma suggests that maybe she doesn’t need to burn the court-plaister because someone could still use it, Harriet for the first time ever basically tells her she’s doing it her way, possibly in a tone of voice that implies if Miss Woodhouse tries to stop her Miss Woodhouse might end up on the burn pile herself.
But Emma doesn’t try to stop her, because Harriet encouragingly promises that the ashes of the fire will bring with them “an end, thank Heaven! of Mr. Elton.”
“And when,” thought Emma, “will there be a beginning of Mr. Churchill?”
Pretty freakin’ soon, actually—or so it appears, because it’s not longer afterward that Emma says, “in the course of some trivial chat, ‘Well, Harriet, whenever you marry, I would advise you to do so and so’”, and Harriet immediately shoots back that she will never marry, never ever ever. And when Emma, digging further, ventures to hope that this resolution “is not in compliment to Mr. Elton”, Harriet is adamant.
“Mr. Elton, indeed!” cried Harriet, indignantly.—“Oh! no”—and Emma could just catch the words, “so superior to Mr. Elton!”
Emma immediately seizes on this as evidence of Harriet crushing on Frank Churchill—just as she’d predicted would happen, after Frank’s dashing rescue of Harriet from the mob of juvenile gypsies. And though Emma’s still too gun-shy to do any active encouraging, she does try to nudge this nascent infatuation along—un the way, say, you’d nudge something along with a battering ram.
“I am not at all surprised at you, Harriet. The service he rendered you was enough to warm your heart.”
“Service! oh, it was such an expressible obligation! The very recollection of it, and all that I felt at the time, when I saw him coming.—his noble look, and my wretchedness before. Such a change! In one moment such a change! From perfect misery to perfect happiness!”
She then warns Harriet not to let her feelings run away with her, but to hold back until the gentleman in question offers her some encouragement, or at least a wolf-whistle or two. And then she adds:
“I give you this caution now, because I shall never speak to you again on the subject. I am determined against all interference. Henceforth I know nothing of the matter. Let no name ever pass our lips.”
But of course, in Austen, “I shall never speak to you again on the subject,” really means “I still have quite a lot to say,” and Emma goes on to reassure Harriet that “more wonderful things have taken place” than a union between two parties of such different social strata; “there have been matches of greater disparity…be assured that your raising your thoughts to him, is a mark of good taste which I shall always know how to value.”
Harriet “kissed her hand in silent and submissive gratitude”, which is pretty much the way Emma likes to have everybody respond to her, though this may be the first time anyone’s actually obliged her. And so she continues the day well satisfied in the way she’s set things up, and looking forward to seeing it all run its course just as she’s imagined it will, because she never learns. It’s all right, though. Arrogant as she is, if she weren’t also a blockhead we wouldn’t be able to stand her.
Austen jump-cuts to June, which finds everything pretty much status quo in Highbury. Only a few matters of interest have undergone a subtle change. Among them, “Mr. Knightley, who for some reason best known to himself, had certainly taken an early dislike to Frank Churchill, was only growing to dislike him more.” His highly refined nose has sniffed out something suspect in Frank’s attentions to Emma. Even though Frank outwardly treats her like his one-and-only, and everyone else, taking their cue from him, accepts this as fact—even Emma, who’s busy trying to divert him onto Harriet—Knightley starts to think his real object is Jane Fairfax. And while toying with Emma’s affections is bad enough, trifling with Jane’s would be worse, because she’s poor and unprotected.
Yet more observation leads him to the idea that maybe Jane isn’t a romantic dupe in this equation; that there may be something “of private liking, of private understanding even,” between them, which unnerves him. We don’t get a clear sense of whether he’s offended by the implication of duplicity, and of clandestine meetings, that this idea carries with it, or whether he’s bothered by the idea that Frank’s led Jane astray. Either way, he feels like he’s on to something, and things keep happening to validate this.
For instance, at an informal gathering of most of the cast at Hartfield, Frank asks his stepmother, “By the bye…what became of Mr. Perry’s plan of setting up his carriage?” Mrs. Weston basically replies Mr. who’s plan to set up what? and Frank has to repeat himself, at which point Mrs. Weston admits she hasn’t the slightest idea what the high holy hell he’s talking about. Frank insists that she does. “You wrote me word of it three months ago.” And Mrs. Weston is all, not with these fingers I didn’t.
Frank keeps insisting and Mrs. Weston keeps denying—“Upon my word I never heard a word of it till this moment”—until Frank, with too self-conscious a laugh, concludes he must have dreamed the whole thing. “I am a great dreamer. I dream of every body at Highbury when I am away; and when I have gone through my particular friends, then I begin dreaming of Mr. and Mrs. Perry.” Hahaha, next subject, please. You can almost sense the nervous sweat on his brow.
Everyone begins to comment on the odd nature of dreams, and Frank might think the spotlight is off him, until you-know-who gets a word in.
“Why, to own the truth,” cried Miss Bates, who had been trying in vain to be heard the last two minutes, “if I must speak on this subject, there is no denying that Mr. Frank Churchill might have—I do not mean to say that he did not dream it—I am sure I have sometimes the oddest dreams in the world—but if I am questioned about it, I must acknowledge that there was such an idea last spring: for Mrs. Perry herself mentioned it to my mother, and the Coles knew of it as well as ourselves—but it was quite a secret, known to nobody else, and only thought of about three days.”
She relates the specifics of the story in exhaustive detail—July and August might pass in the interim; hell, the British rail system may spring up before she’s done. But eventually she does conclude, and in high style.
“…I will not positively answer for my having never dropt a hint, because I know I do sometimes pop out a thing before I am aware. I am a talker, you know; I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not. I am not like Jane; I wish I were. I will answer for it she never betrayed the least thing in the world. Where is she? Oh! just behind. Perfectly remember Mrs. Perry’s coming. Extraordinary dream indeed!”
Miss Bates saying “I am rather a talker,” is like Donald Trump saying “I have a bit of self-esteem.”
During this spiel, Knightley catches Frank—in whose face “he thought he saw confusion suppressed or laughed away”—turn involuntarily towards Jane, but the angle is wrong for him to see Jane’s reaction. Still, he clearly suspects that Jane—she who “never betrayed the least thing in the world”—is the one who told Frank about Mr. Perry’s plan for a carriage. He gets further ammo for this theory when Frank—who seems congenitally unable to go ninety seconds without indulging in some kind of frivolity—seizes Emma’s nephews’ alphabet and ropes everyone into playing…even the patriarch, who admires the “quietness” of the game, which is in marked contrast to “the more animated sort, which Mr. Weston had occasionally introduced,” and which were apparently too anarchic for Mr. Woodhouse’s inert and easily startled nature. You can’t help picturing the whole gang tangled up in a round of Twister, or something.
I’m not certain of the mechanics of this alphabet game—it’s one of those things Austen assumes her reader will already know, unaware that in this case her reader is two hundred years in the future and mainly plays Scrabble against his smart-phone. But the upshot is, one player sets up a word that another player has to guess; and Frank—that impish little bounder—produces a word that, when Jane guesses it, causes her to blush. Knightley sees this, and his antennae go up.
Jane pushes the puzzle away, but Harriet—“eager after every fresh word, and finding out none”—grabs hold of it and gives it a go. Alas, she has the vocabulary of a nine-year-old and the brains of a laying hen, so she has to turn to Knightley for help. With his keen eye he immediately sees that the word is “blunder.” And with his even keener mind he infers it as an admission from Frank, of having blurted out in public something he’d forgotten Jane had told him in confidence. He’s now convinced: the two young people are in cahoots.
How the delicacy, the discretion of his favourite could have been so lain asleep! He feared there must be some decided involvement. Disingenuousness and double dealing seemed to meet him at every turn. These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick. It was a child’s play, chosen to conceal a deeper game on Frank Churchill’s part.
Frank goes on to prove this—and in the process earn Knightley’s increased scorn—by giving a word to Emma that makes her blush and laugh. He then he glances towards Jane and says, “I will give it to her,—shall I?” Emma forbids him to do so, but that works about as well as it usually does with Frank, and he passes it over to Jane, and “with a particular degree of sedate civility entreated her to study it.” Knightley makes an effort to get a glimpse of the word, which he quickly sees is “Dixon.”
Jane twigs to it almost as soon as he does, and she is not happy. Not. One. Bit. She looks up, sees Frank and Emma regarding her expectantly, and says only, “I did not know that proper names were allowed.” Way to rise above it, Jane, sweetheart. She then pushes the letters angrily away and turns from the game, refusing to play further. And when her aunt announces it’s time to go, Jane is out the door like a shot. I picture all the alphabet sheets fluttering up from the table in her backdraft. Also, considering her anger, possibly the curtains catch fire.
By now, Knightley has seen more than enough. But he’s a deliberate man—meaning, he proceeds with forethought and self-command; the opposite of Frank—and Austen gives us this lovely portrait of him in the aftermath of his discoveries.
He remained at Hartfield after all the rest, his thoughts full of what he had seen; so full, that when the candles came to assist his observations, he must,—yes, he certainly must, as a friend—an anxious friend—give Emma some hint, ask her some question. He could not see her in a situation of such danger, without trying to preserve her. It was his duty.
I have two comments to make on this passage. Firstly, it—and the chapter that contains it—are told entirely from the point of view of Mr. Knightley. From her cautious beginnings (in Sense and Sensibility, which is told almost exclusively from Elinor Dashwood’s point of view) Austen’s powers have expanded and deepened, so that in her last published novel before this one, Mansfield Park, she easily encompassed the points of view of many of her cast of characters. In Emma, however, she retreats; we only really ever enter the heads of two of the principals: Emma herself, of course, and Knightley. This is especially noteworthy in that Emma is one of Austen’s longest novels (only Mansfield Park matches it for sheer heft), for which reason our confinement to the thoughts, observations, and judgments of only Emma and Knightley serve to give their eventual coming together a kind of inevitability—despite, up to this point in the novel (and we’re well into its final fifth) scarcely a word indicating any such thing. Yes, Austen is manipulating us, but wonderfully deftly, and in a way in which we like being manipulated. In fact, this is the kind of thing we turn to literature for.
Secondly, I’d just like to point out that single fragment, “when the candles came to assist his observations”. We live in the age of electric lighting, so your eyes might just glide right over this passage. But when you pause to think about it, you realize that the way in which the candles “came to assist” Knightley’s observations, is by servants coming in and lighting them. I’ve commented many times on the near-total invisibility of the servant class in Austen’s novels; and on the rare occasions that they’re acknowledged to exist, they barely register as human.
As I write this, a novel has just been released—Longbourn, by Jo Baker—that purports to tell the story of Pride and Prejudice from the downstairs point of view. As longtime readers of this blog will know, I’ve been openly advocating for something similar for years (if we have to have Austen sequels at all, which is something I consider eminently arguable). I haven’t yet read Longbourn, though I intend to; but the phrase currently under discussion—“when the candles came to assist his observations”—does seem to imply that novelists undertaking to imagine the lives of Austen’s servants have a comparatively easy time of it. They can basically invent from whole cloth. Hartfield, for instance, presumably has a larger staff than the households of any previous Austen novel, and yet we don’t know one goddamn thing about it. If someone published a novel in which the whole place was run by Mr. Woodhouse’s illegitimate offspring, borne by the Caribbean voodoo priestess he brought back to England to be his housekeeper and love slave—well, there’s not a word in Emma to contradict it.
Knightley confronts Emma with his theory that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are all boom-shaka-laka, and you can pretty much guess the response he gets.
“Never, never!” she cried with a most open eagerness. “…[H]ow could it possibly come into your head?”
“I have lately imagined that I saw symptoms of attachment between them; certain expressive looks, which I did not believe meant to be public.”
“Oh! you amuse me excessively. I am delighted to find that you can vouchsafe to let your imagination wander; but it will not do. There is no admiration between them, I do assure you…they are as far from any attachment or admiration for one another, as any two beings in the world can be. That is, I presume it do be so on her side, and I can answer for its being so on his. I will answer for the gentleman’s indifference.”
Well, actually…yes, she will answer for it. But not quite yet.
At any rate, her overwhelming confidence (and probably her mockery as well) manage to convince Knightley he’s been following a bad scent, so he slinks off to Donwell Abbey. That he’s reduced to slinking—not to mention ignoring the evidence of his own eyes and the judgments of his own mind—speaks to Emma’s power over him. This is a man for whom slinking is not an everyday habit. Possibly this is even his first time. The net of inevitability is drawing tighter—though the two idiots caught in its weave have yet to realize it’s even there.
Finally, amidst all this private ferment, the Highbury crowd is “obliged to endure the mortification of hearing that [the Sucklings] could not possibly come till the autumn.” Which means everybody has to fall back on their standard novelties, which are waiting for Frank Churchill’s aunt to kick the bucket, or for his stepmother to get a bun in the oven. Death, birth…the usual round.
No one is more disappointed, however, than Mrs. Elton, for whom the absence of the Sucklings means “the delay of a great deal of pleasure and parade.” But then, like the unkillable she-beast she is, she rallies. Why not just parade, anyway?...A picnic on scenic Box Hill had been proposed, and there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t just go forth as planned.
The problem is, it really wasn’t planned for her. It had been Emma’s idea, as she’s never seen Box Hill, and Mr. Weston had agreed to make the necessary arrangements. That he’d then, with typical thoughtless enthusiasm, invited the Eltons to join the party, royally pisses off Emma, but she has to swallow the indignity to avoid hurting either him or his wife. But Emma has also, by this time, had enough experience of Mrs. Elton to know what’s coming: that the lady in question will sail in and co-opt everything, utterly confident that the whole expedition is being undertaken for her sake.
Emma almost escapes this indignity, however, when one of the carriage horses goes lame; but then Mr. Knightley steps in and invites everyone to come instead of Donwell Abbey, which is within walking distance, to pick his now ripening strawberries. Mrs. Elton fastens onto this idea like a leech onto a leg.
Donwell was famous for its strawberry-beds, which seemed a plea for the invitation; but no plea was necessary; cabbage-beds would have been enough to tempt the lady, who only wanted to be going somewhere. She promised him again and again to come—much oftener than he doubted—and was extremely gratified by such a proof of intimacy, such a distinguishing compliment as she chose to consider it.
Mrs. Elton then turns into the guest from hell, plaguing Knightley with ideas, suggestions, and requests, and basically threatening to tear the whole running of the thing from his manly grip. When she asks him to name the day for the outing, he tells her he can’t do so until he’s conferred with the other intended guests. She waves this consideration away, like a bad smell.
“Oh, leave all that to me; only give me a carte-blanche.—I am Lady Patroness, you know. It is my party. I will bring friends with me.”
“I hope you will bring Elton,” said he; “but I will not trouble you to give any other invitations.”
“Oh, now you are looking very sly;—but consider,—you need not be afraid of delegating power to me. I am no young lady on her preferment. Married women, you know, may be safely authorized. It is my party. Leave it all to me. I will invite your guests.”
Knightley manages to emerge victorious in this skirmish, but then Mrs. Elton is onto the next encroachment, and the next. It’s absolutely hilarious. I picture her actually, physically closing in on him, while he backs away, step by step, till he’s up against the wall and can’t go any farther. Then Mrs. Elton unhinges her jaw and devours him whole.
“I wish we had a donkey. The thing would be for us all to come on donkeys, Jane, Miss Bates, and me, and my caro sposo walking by. I really must talk to him about purchasing a donkey. In a country life I conceive it to be a sort of necessary; for, let a woman have ever so many resources, it is not possible for her to be always shut up at home; and very long walks, you know—in summer there is dust, and in winter there is dirt.”
“You will not find either between Donwell and Highbury. Donwell-lane is never dusty, and now it is perfectly dry. Come on a donkey, however, if you prefer it...I would wish every thing to be as much to your taste as possible.”
“That I am sure you would. Indeed I do you justice, my good friend. Under that peculiar sort of dry, blunt manner, I know you have the warmest heart. As I tell Mr. E., you are a thorough humorist. Yes, believe me, Knightley, I am fully sensibly of your attention to me in the whole of this scheme. You have hit upon the very thing to please me.”
Possibly the next thing Knightley hits upon is the road, with a hastily packed valise and the intention of fleeing to India until someone drives a stake through Mrs. Elton’s hellspawned heart.
But no, he’s made of sterner stuff; and in fact he goes so far as to lure Mr. Woodhouse over to the Abbey for the outing—not, of course, to frolic about in the strawberry beds, where there might be spiders lurking, or snakes, or more pint-size gypsies with daggers clamped between their teeth…but to sit in Knightley’s library, by a fire, and look over some of his books. Not to be outdone, Mr. Weston, “unasked, promised to get Frank over to join them, if possible; a proof of approbation and gratitude which could have been dispensed with.” Hey, I barked a laugh.
In the meantime, the lame horse recovers more swiftly than expected, so the Box Hill expedition gets revived; and it’s settled that the Donwell strawberry-ganza will be one day, and Box Hill the next. I tell you, the arduous lives of these Regency gentry…
It’s a bright midsummer day when everyone descends on Donwell, and Emma is particularly keen to have a look around, because she hasn’t been here in two years. This gives the author opportunity to indulge her own passion for real-estate porn; though Donwell Abbey is a less majestic pile than Pemberley, being “rambling and irregular, with many comfortable and one or two handsome rooms”. Still it gets the only nod it really needs, which is that it “looked what it was…the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding.”
Meantime, the entire party—with the exception of Frank, who’s expected at any time—takes to the strawberry beds and begins filling their baskets, and Mrs. Elton provides a running commentary that’s one of Austen’s most screamingly funny monologues.
“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 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.”
My guess is that the time frame in which all of this is covered, is about seven minutes.
Once she’s composed herself in the shade, Mrs. Elton has the energy to attack Jane Fairfax the way she’s recently molested Mr. Knightley. She’s found a very desirable position for Jane, with “an acquaintance of Mrs. Suckling, a lady known at Maple Grove. Delightful, charming, superior, first circles, spheres, lines, ranks, every thing; and Mrs. Elton was wild to have the offer closed with immediately.” Jane politely but firmly refuses, which works about as well with Mrs. Elton as it ever does; she keeps banging away at Jane, so that Jane eventually has to get up and go for a walk about the grounds, before Mrs. Elton resorts to a choke-hold to force her to submit.
Most of the rest of the cast also go for a stroll, which takes them into view of Abbey-Mill Farm. Emma worries that the sight of the place might trigger some nostalgia in Harriet, but when she looks around she finds Harriet happily leading the way with Mr. Knightley, the two of them engaged in an animated tête-à-tête. This seems an odd pairing to Emma—especially when she eavesdrops and hears that their discussion is about agriculture—but if it’s keeping Harriet’s mind off Robert Martin, Emma’s all for it.
The party then removes to the house for a cold repast and some more openly expressed worries about Frank Churchill, who still hasn’t shown up. Conjectures fly: the famous aunt has taken a turn for the worse…Frank’s horse has taken a turn for the worse…though the general feeling in both cases is all for Frank, with none spared for either nag.
A short time later, Emma, having a snoop—excuse me, a wander—about the halls, bumps into Jane Fairfax, who’s “coming quickly in from the garden, with a look of escape.” Jane’s a bit flustered at first—clearly she was hoping to make a clean getaway, unnoticed by anyone—but as long as she’s been caught out, she might as well ask Emma to make her apologies to the others, when they finally realize she’s no longer there.
Emma agrees, of course, but argues it’s too hot to be walking out, and too long a way to be going alone; but Jane’s fixed on going, no matter what. Emma doesn’t understand the reason for this; is she perhaps tired?
“I am,” she answered, “I am fatigued; but it is not the sort of fatigue—quick walking will refresh me. Miss Woodhouse, we all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted. The greatest kindness you can show me, will be to let me have my own way, and only say that I am gone when it is necessary.”
Emma’s got nothing to put up against this kind of desperation, so she gives way. And just as Jane is parting, she turns and exclaims, “Oh! Miss Woodhouse, the comfort of being sometimes alone!”
This is one of the most affecting moments in all of Austen, and even Emma—no fan of Jane’s—feels it, and is abashed on considering (maybe for the first time) what it must be like for Jane to live so dependent on everybody around her, in so small an apartment, and with an aunt who’s like a talk-radio show that can never be turned off.
Fifteen minutes later someone else shows Emma some different colors, as Frank Churchill finally arrives (delayed by the ailing aunt; so those among the party who guessed as much, win the five-piece dinette set). The ride over was hot and Frank is tired and cranky, and when he sits down with Emma and Mr. Woodhouse he sulks and fidgets.
“You will soon be cooler, if you sit still,” said Emma.
“As soon as I am cooler I shall go back again. I could very ill be spared; but such a point had been made of my coming! You will all be going soon, I suppose; the whole party breaking up. I met one as I came—Madness in such weather!—absolute madness!”
He’s clearly referring to Jane; which immediately suggests to us that there was some kind of scene between them when they met—an exchange of words unpleasant to both of them; maybe he tried to get her to come back, or offered to accompany her back to town, and was rebuffed either way. But Emma, amazingly, decides that his “state might be best defined by the expressive phrase of being out of humour. Some people were always cross when they were hot.” She tries to get him to eat, or drink, and he just shakes his head and keeps fussing, till eventually, when he goes off in search of a spruce beer, Emma thinks to herself how lucky she is not to be in love with that guy anymore, because sheesh.
He comes back in a better humor—in fact, his usual self, charming and talking nonsense—and sits back down and looks over some maps with Emma and Mr. Woodhouse, offering quips and comments to amuse both of them. Emma is so won over that she persuades him to stay in Highbury and come to Box Hill the next day.
It’s a good thing he does, too; because when it comes to being surly and snarky, Frank’s a rank amateur. On Box Hill, Emma’s going to show him how it’s done.
In fact, she’s going to show them all.

Emma, chapters 37-39

Emma finally puts her finger on what’s unsettling her about Frank Churchill’s return to Highbury. It isn’t her own feelings she’s worried about; it’s his. She’s pretty sure she’s over any silly Barbie Dream House fantasies she ever had about him; but she’s not so sure he isn’t still gearing up for be-my-bride-and-bear-my-children. And having ridden that particular Tilt-A-Whirl with Mr. Elton, she’s not keen to repeat the experience, especially with someone she actually likes.
But then the sorta-kinda dreaded day arrives; Frank dutifully pays a visit to Hartfield…and Emma’s relieved to discover she’s been worrying about nothing. He’s clearly glad to see her, but there’s none of the weird romantic intensity he was giving off like Kryptonite rays at their last meeting, in the Bates family parlor. Though there is something about him that’s a little…off.
He was not calm; his spirits were evidently fluttered; there was restlessness about him. Lively as he was, it seemed a liveliness that did not satisfy himself: but what decided her belief on the subject, was his staying only a quarter of an hour, and hurrying away to make other calls in Highbury.
Emma, whose thickness at this point is truly epic—I don’t know the densest element in the periodic table, but whatever it is they should rename it Emmanite—decides that Frank’s skittishness can only be due to her lethal attractiveness—“a dread of her returning power, and a discreet resolution of not trusting himself with her for long.” As though, given enough exposure to her, he’ll lose control and go all Neanderthal, dragging her by her hair through town and bellowing, “Mine!”
And then…that’s it. Ten days pass, and no more Frank. Eventually we learn that London hasn’t suited his aunt at all (really?—she’s suffering from a nervous disorder, and she isn’t thriving in the noisiest, dirtiest, most chaotic locale in the entire British empire? Color me astonished), as a result of which she hasn’t felt able to do without Frank. Not sure why. It’s hard for me to believe his presence is all that calming; even at his lowest wattage, you can still hear him buzzing like a hive of bees. Maybe he gives good foot rubs or something.
Anyway, that’s the bad news. The good news is that the Churchills have decided to relocate to a house in Richmond, which is even closer than London. So Frank will be able to bop on over any time at all, without it having to be a day-trip approved in advance by Aunt Hall Monitor.
And since Frank will now be a mere hour’s ride away, the scheme of the ball at the Crown is revived. Apparently it was never entirely given up; because, I guess, if you live in Highbury and you have exactly one thing on your social calendar for the entire year and that goes belly-up, you’re not real quick to move on.
This time nothing happens to derail the ball, so the day arrives and Frank arrives with it. His first new meeting with Emma won’t be a private one, but will take place at the Crown—because Mr. Weston has asked her to join them early “for the purpose of taking her opinion as to the propriety and comfort of the rooms before any other person came”. Though given that this is immediately prior to the ball, it’s not apparent what Mr. Weston would do if Emma saw something she couldn’t approve. It’s not like he’s left himself any time to fix it. Probably he’d just find a quiet corner and have a good cry.
Frank is quiet at this reunion with Emma, “and though he did not say much, his eyes declared that he meant to have a delightful evening.” No surprise here; expecting to have a delightful time is pretty much Frank’s default setting.
While they’re walking about with Mr. Weston, giving the place the once-over, another carriage pulls up and disgorges a group of people, and Emma can’t believe anyone would arrive so “unreasonably” early…then she discovers that they, too, were invited by Mr. Weston to come and put their stamp of approval on the ball’s preparations. Yet another carriage arrives for the same purpose, and pretty soon it seems like Mr. Weston has summoned the entire guest list to this pre-party inspection.
Emma perceived that her taste was not the only taste on which Mr. Weston depended, and felt, that to be the favourite and intimate of a man who had so many intimates and confidants, was not the very first distinction in the scale of vanity. She liked his open manners, but a little less of open-heartedness would have made him a higher character.—General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.—She could fancy such a man.
I don’t think there’s another writer, alive or dead, who could’ve penned that paragraph. It’s like all six Austen novels, reduced in a sauté pan to a potent, complex, and utterly delicious ounce of sauce.
Conspicuously absent among the inspection crew, however, are the Bates family. Mr. Weston had offered to pick them up, but learned that they were promised a lift by the Eltons. In the next breath we’re told that Frank is standing by Emma, “but not steadily; there was a restlessness, which showed a mind not at ease.” Hm, suddenly not at ease at the mention of the Bates party. Wonder what that can mean. Then he starts darting to the door at the sound of every new carriage. When he notices Emma observing this behavior, he tells her he’s just curious to see Mrs. Elton; “I have heard so much of her. It cannot be long, I think, before she comes.” A moment later he bolts out at the sound of more wheels on gravel, only to shoot back in and say, “I am forgetting I am not acquainted with her. I have never seen either Mr. or Mrs. Elton. I have no business to put myself forward.”
This is rather squirrelly behavior, even for Frank. But it’s forgotten immediately as Mr. and Mrs. Elton enter the Crown…alone. “But Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax!” Mr. Weston says. “We thought you were to bring them!” Typically, the Eltons—the vicar and his “Jane-Fairfax-will-always-be-uppermost-in-my-thoughts-and-deeds” wife—have utterly spaced out their promise. What a pair of self-involved asshats. 
So the coach is sent back. Meantime, Frank is introduced, and Emma practically hops up and down on alternating feet in her eagerness to hear his opinion of her new bête noir. But before this can happen the Eltons' carriage returns, and since someone’s mentioned rain Frank darts out with an umbrella. “Miss Bates must not be forgotten,” he says, overlooking the fact that Miss Bates started out the night being forgotten. Mr. Weston tries to follow, the better to greet his newly arrived guests, but Mrs. Elton detains him by clamping her fingers around his arm and braying her approval of his son.
“A very fine young man, indeed, Mr. Weston. You know I candidly told you I should form my own opinion; and I am happy to say that I am extremely pleased with him. You may believe me. I never compliment. I think him a very handsome young man, and his manners are precisely what I like and approve,—so truly the gentleman, without the least conceit or puppyism. You must know I have a vast dislike to puppies—quite a horror of them. They were never tolerated at Maple Grove. Neither Mr. Suckling nor me had ever any patience with them; and we used sometimes to say very cutting things. Selina, who is mild almost to a fault, bore with them much better.”
I picture Mr. Weston trying gently to extricate himself from her grip, and gradually giving up as he’s held captive through the endless litany of extremely pleased and very handsome and puppyism Maple Grove Mr. Suckling Selina. And we surrender as well; we’ve learned by now to expect this kind of triumphal grandstanding from Mrs. Elton, and I, for one, revel in it. It’s so brazenly, hideously egocentric.
But, oh baby. Mrs. Elton is about to meet her match.
We’ve seen this before; midway through a novel, Austen will introduce a new power-talker who threatens to take over the entire narrative, to our horror and delight—only to have the story’s prior power-talker come roaring back in to reclaim his or her title. Mrs. Jennings did this in Sense and Sensibility, obliterating in the process that upstart gabbler Robert Ferrars.
We see it again now, as Miss Bates enters the Crown. She “came in talking, and had not finished her speech under many minutes after her being admitted into the circle at the fire.” I’m not certain which is the longest uninterrupted monologue in the Austen canon, but it might very well be this one, as Miss Bates rattles on for more than two solid pages without a paragraph break—almost without punctuation. Here’s just a small sampling:
“Ah! Dear Ms. 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 neighbors. 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. 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 we not often talk of Mr. Frank Churchill? Ah! here’s Miss Woodhouse. Dear Miss Woodhouse, how do you do?...”
By the end of this epic spiel, you’re like, “Augusta who?”
But Mrs. Elton isn’t the kind of competitor to give up so easily. And so “as soon as Miss Bates was quiet” (I think it happens around 1937) we’re boomeranged back to our favorite harridan, who, having heard Frank Churchill compliment Jane Fairfax’s gown, “was evidently wanting to be complimented herself—and it was, ‘How do you like my gown?—How do you like my trimming?—How has Wright done my hair?’” But unlike Miss Bates, Mrs. Elton is not a stream-of-consciousness talker; she has an agenda—which is to prompt praise and admiration from others, then pronounce herself the kind of woman who cares nothing for praise and admiration. So after Frank and Jane have “with patient politeness” answered all her queries about how well she looks, she insists:
“Nobody can think less of dress in general than I do: but upon such an occasion as this, when every body’s eyes are so much upon me, and in compliment to the Westons, who I have no doubt are giving this ball chiefly to do me honour,—I would not wish to be inferior to others: and I see very few pearls in the room except mine.”
Meantime Frank escapes to—finally—give Emma his opinion of Highbury’s newest addition.
“How do you like Mrs. Elton?” said Emma, in a whisper.
“Not at all.”
“You are ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful!—what do you mean?” Then changing from a frown to a smile,—“No, do not tell me,—I do not want to know what you mean. Where is my father? When are we to begin dancing?”
Frank’s squirrelliness is now upgraded to Orange Alert status. Emma just can’t figure what the hell’s going on with him. Unfortunately, she’s distracted from thinking about it by a new crisis, which is that Mrs. Weston has just realized Mrs. Elton “must be asked to begin the ball; that she would expect it; which interfered with all their wishes of giving Emma that distinction.”
But Emma, for once, is a grown-up about it; she not only relinquishes any claim to the first dance, but offers up Frank as a partner—a sacrifice fortunately made unnecessary when Mr. Weston proposes himself instead. And so the dancing begins. Mr. Weston sweeps Mrs. Elton out onto the floor, and Frank and Emma are shunted to the sidelines until they can follow. “Emma must submit to stand second to Mrs. Elton, though she had always considered the ball as particularly for her. It was almost enough to make her think of marrying.” Accent on that “almost.”
Despite this small annoyance, Emma’s enjoying herself; though she can’t help being disturbed by the sight of Mr. Knightley standing idle. He ought to be dancing, “not classing himself with the husbands, and fathers, and whist-players, who were pretending to feel an interest in the dance till their rubbers were made up,—so young as he looked!”
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; and excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him. 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.
I’ve previously noted Jane Austen’s connoisseurship of male pulchritude, and this—an almost lip-smacking description of Knightley’s general beefcakery—is our first confirmation that he’s this novel’s dark horse: the slow starter who will, by steadfastness, integrity, honor, and a righteously firm booty, win over our heroine at the end. He’s certainly in marked contrast to Frank Churchill at this ball—what with Frank skittering about inexplicably, like a highly caffeinated spider-monkey.
If that weren’t proof enough of Knightley’s leading-man cred, he’s now promoted to full-on superhero status. It happens like this: Emma notices that Harriet is a wallflower; and that Mr. Elton, also without a partner, is heedlessly headed her way. She fully expects him to notice her, then turn on his heel and beat a hasty retreat. But instead, Mr. Elton notices her and keeps on a-comin’. He doesn’t mean to ask her to dance; no, to Emma’s disgust, he means to make an elaborate show of not asking her. He primps and preens in front of her, dripping contempt with every gesture—in fact he does everything short of backing right up to her and breaking wind.
And then Mrs. Weston, not twigging to his nefarious purpose, comes over to try to persuade him to dance. He responds graciously—“If Mrs. Gilbert wishes to dance…I shall have great pleasure I am sure”—but she says not Mrs. Gilbert, I mean Miss Smith—Miss Smith who is like, Hello, sitting right here. And this is where Mr. Elton gets downright cretinous.
“Miss Smith—oh!—I had not observed. You are extremely obliging—and if I were not an old married man,—but my dancing days are over, Mrs. Weston. You will excuse me. Any thing else I should be most happy to do, at your command—but my dancing days are over.”
Emma’s jaw drops at this—she’s all, Nuh-uh, he diyun’t—and even Mrs. Weston is left dumbstruck. He couldn’t have been more insulting if he’d dumped a cream pie down her bodice-front. Emma “would not look again. Her heart was in a glow, and she feared her face might be as hot.”
But hold on, here comes the cavalry:
In another moment a happier sight caught her—Mr. Knightley leading Harriet to the set!—Never had she been more surprised, seldom more delighted, than at that instant. She was all pleasure and gratitude, both for Harriet and herself, and longed to be thanking him; and though too distant for speech, her countenance said as much, as soon as she could catch his eye again.
And to make it all even more extra-super-special, Emma now sees that Mr. Knightley’s Gagnam Style moves are every bit as groovalicious as she knew they would be. He pretty much rules the dance floor, using Harriet the way Fred Astaire made a partner of a hat rack in that famous clip they always show on PBS at pledge drive.
Mr. and Mrs. Elton, witnessing this, scamper off together to sneer and spit venom, like Captain Hook and Cruella de Vil, and it’s all very lump-in-the-throat, swelling violins stuff. An ordinary, vulgar writer would end the chapter right here, with sunshine and splendor swirling around everyone’s ankles as they spin joyfully to the music.
But not our Jane Austen. She’s given us this little moment of cream and honey; now it’s time to cut it with a sharp dose of citric acid. The party moves in to dinner, and Miss Bates takes over the novel again with another two pages of side-splitting logorrhea, from which you may need oxygen and a good afternoon's rest to recover.
Then, finally, our two principals come together again. Mr. Knightley, no fool, has unerringly inferred the motive behind the Eltons’ rudeness, and in his opinion Emma has some ‘splainin’ to do. “They aimed at wounding more than Harriet…Emma, why is it that they are your enemies?”
She admits that she’d wanted Mr. Elton to marry Harriet, “and they cannot forgive me.” Knightley allows himself “a smile of indulgence,” but manfully holds back from any fist-pumping I-told-you-so’s. “I shall not scold you,” he says. “I leave you to your own reflections.”
Grateful, Emma admits that she’d had the whole thing pegged wrong from the get-go.
“I do own myself to have been completely mistaken in Mr. Elton. There is a littleness about him which you discovered, and which I did not: and I was fully convinced of his being in love with Harriet. It was through a series of strange blunders!”
To which he replies:
“And, in return for your acknowledging so much, I will do you the justice to say, that you would have chosen for him better than he has chosen for himself. Harriet Smith has some first-rate qualities, which Mrs. Elton is totally without. An unpretending, single minded, artless girl—infinitely to be preferred by any man of sense and taste to such a woman as Mrs. Elton. I found Harriet more conversable than I expected.”
This is the most generous, least adversarial exchange this particular pair of obviously smitten dimwits has ever had, and they’re so nearly drunk on cordiality that they even agree to dance together.
“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.”
Make of that what you will. Generations of readers have made plenty.
The next day, Emma is able to look back on the ball with complete pretty much satisfaction. Oh, sure, the Eltons were a pair of utter see-you-next-Tuesdays; but given the way their appalling behavior exposed the truth about them to many of the revelers (certainly to Mrs. Weston), and given how it inspired Mr. Knightley so gallantly to dance, and cured once and forever any lingering, whimpering affection Harriet might have had for the vicious little vicar—well, even that couldn’t have played out any more brilliantly. “Harriet rational, Frank Churchill not too much in love, and Mr. Knightley not wanting to quarrel with her; how very happy a summer must be before her!”
She’s able to enjoy this little idyll for about two-and-a-half minutes; then the doors of Hartfield dramatically burst open, and Frank Churchill enters with a gust of wind, grasping the swooning form of Harriet Smith.
Something dreadful has obviously occurred; and having been exposed to decades of turgid, overwrought, chest-thumping melodramas in our depressingly tasteless popular culture, you can’t be blamed if you now think something similar is to sully the pages of Emma.
But of course, you’re wrong. Here’s how Austen goes on to narrate the scene.
A young lady who faints must be recovered; questions must be answered, and surprises be explained. Such events are very interesting; but the suspense of them cannot last long.
You want to know why I love Jane Austen?...It’s all right there. Not a single goddamn syllable wasted on frivolous feeling. Just the intellectual variety, with a soupcon of scampiness. She has cut crystal running in her veins; she’s brilliant, and she’s hard, she’s dazzling. And she’s ours.
It’s soon revealed that Harriet and another of Mrs. Goddard’s boarders, one Miss Bickerton, were out walking along the Richmond road, when about half a mile outside Highbury they came across some gypsies, who did what gypsies usually do, which is beg for money. Miss Bickerton bolted so fast she might have had a jetpack strapped to her corset. Harriet, of course, dithered, and in dithering allowed herself to be surrounded; at which time she pretty much did every single wrong thing you can do in this situation, and in the absolute worst order. She cringed; she cried; she gave them money; she pleaded for mercy; she ran; she tripped and fell; she cried some more. The gypsies were all over her by then, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were motivated less by greed than by sheer wonder at what she might do next. For all they knew, she might withdraw into her torso, like a tortoise, or maybe her head would fly off her shoulders like a Roman candle.
Unfortunately their curiosity was thwarted by Frank Churchill, who’d come along just in time to chase them off, probably waving his cane and making a loud noise, because I like to think Frank is the kind of man who enjoys a chance to wave a cane and make a loud noise. Then Frank scooped up all the little globules of Harriet he could find and carried them back to town in a bucket. He headed straight for Hartfield, on account of because.
After having deposited Harriet in Emma’s care, Frank apologetically hits the road—he’d been en route to London when the incident occurred, and the whole thing has made him lamentably late. If he doesn’t reach his aunt in time, she may just expire from anxiety. (Although when you think about it, there’s a plan.)
But Emma doesn’t take offense at his hasty departure. Her head is too filled with all sorts of possibilities of the kind she promised she’d never, ever, ever entertain again, cross her heart and hope to die, no really this time I mean it I swear.
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?
When the popular mash-up novels that feature Austen characters fighting zombies, sea monsters, and vampires run their course, maybe one final volume can be an original work in which a violent throng of linguists, grammarians, and mathematicians stalk the author in search of revenge. Don’t know why she felt it necessary to trash-talk academics here…but man, that is some serious flaming.
Emma’s can’t stop contemplating just how remarkable it is that that thing, which has never happened before in Highbury, should happen at that particular moment, to that particular girl, at just the time when that exact gentleman was happening by. Not sure whether Austen knew the word “kismet,” and even if she did she may have refrained from using it, as it isa bit showy. But the basic conviction is the same: this can only have happened for a reason.
Meantime, the neighborhood is thrilled to the marrow by the story of Harriet’s near ravishment by a horde of desperate hooligans (actually the gypsies were all children except for one adult, who was presumably their mother, but let’s not let that ruin a good, salacious story), and you can just imagine Mr. Woodhouse’s reaction. He’s not leaving the house ever again, not even to walk his own grounds—not without a musket, a pack of wolfhounds, and a wheeling catapult armed with Greek fire. His grandsons are made of sterner stuff; a week later they’re “still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting [Emma] right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original.”
Lucky boys; by the time they reach middle age, there’ll be a whole cottage industry of Victorian murder mysteries, filled with dastardly Orientals and helpless, terrified virgins. We’re not so fortunate; all we have to look forward to, in the next batch of chapters, is a visit from the Sucklings. (Yep. Those Sucklings.) Mrs. Elton will be in her glory...and thinking of it, rapacious foreign devils might seem tabby-cat tame in comparison.

Emma, chapters 34-36

We come now to a peculiar run of chapters, in which Austen turns her attention from her principals and gives the stage to the secondary and even tertiary characters. Emma is a very long novel, and those of you who think it’s just the most super-perfect Austen novel ever will probably now troll me something fierce for suggesting that it is, perhaps, somewhat longer than it needs to be. The laser-like focus of Pride and Prejudice is lacking here; not a line—not a syllable—was superfluous in that lean, mean earlier masterpiece. Whereas in Emma the many conversations between the B-Team characters strike me as Austen indulging herself; she was clearly, at this point in her career, feeling her powers, and enjoying them a tad too much. “Look at all these characters I can bring to life with just a few lines of dialogue!” Granted, the chapters in question introduce ideas and themes that will pay dividends later; but she could’ve found a cleaner means of conveying the same information. ‘S’all I’m sayin’.
And Austen apparently agrees with me; because after the rambling chattiness of these sections of Emma, she’ll snap back into military precision mode. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion will be shorter, tighter, and more exquisitely controlled.
Still, this is more in the nature of an observation than a complaint; because while Emma might meander a bit, here at the end of its second volume, it’s never dull; and while we’d rather spend a succession of pages eavesdropping on Emma and Knightley than on their not so brilliantly attractive supporting cast, there are some wonderfully funny set pieces as compensation, one in particular ranking among Austen’s best thigh-slappers. And it’s still, of course, even at this late date, wildly interesting to watch Austen grow as a writer—brusquely elbowing her way into new narrative byways, and sometimes retreating, but not without having a good tramp around first.
So. Down to it. But before Austen can turn the book over to the second-tier characters, she first has to gather them all in one place. This is easily done; for it’s Emma’s turn to follow all the rest of Highbury in throwing a dinner for the newlywed Eltons. She’d rather have root canal, to be sure; all the same she “must not do less than others, or she should be exposed to odious suspicions, and imagined capable of pitiful resentment.”
Mrs. Elton, as can be expected, pretty much glories in all this attention. She’s like a queen who’s finally been given a throne and a scepter and means to seriously make up for lost time.
No invitation came amiss to her. Her Bath habits made evening parties perfectly natural to her, and Maple Grove had given her a taste for dinners. She was a little shocked at the want of two drawing-rooms, at the poor attempt at rout-cakes, and there being no ice in the Highbury card parties. Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Perry, Mrs. Goddard, and others, were a good deal behind hand in knowledge of the world, but she would soon show them how every thing ought to be arranged.
As for Emma’s party, the guest list virtually writes itself: her father, the Eltons, the Westons, Mr. Knightley, and “poor little Harriet must be asked to make the eighth”—an honor which, fortunately, the girl declines, it not being her idea of a rollicking good time to spend a whole evening watching the man who spurned her make kissy-faces across the room at his swanky new wife. Emma’s relieved by Harriet’s refusal, and “delighted in the fortitude of her little friend” (for some reason we’re suddenly playing up Harriet’s littleness, to the point where you imagine a servant putting a high-chair back into storage now that he knows she’s not coming). As a bonus, Emma is now free to “invite the very person whom she really wanted to make the eighth, Jane Fairfax.” It seems Mr. Knightley’s crack about Mrs. Elton offering Jane attentions “which nobody else paid her” has lodged itself in Emma’s craw, and she’s suffering from a severe case of retroactive guilt. “Of the same age, and always knowing her, I ought to have been more friend. She will never like me now. I have neglected her too long. But I will show her greater attention than I have done.”
So the party is set…but then there’s the sudden addition of Mr. John Knightley, who’s bringing his two eldest children to stay at Hartfield, and will by chance arrive on the very day of the dinner party. Mr. Woodhouse has one of his trademark slow-motion fits of apoplexy, because he considers “eight persons at dinner as the utmost that his nerves could bear—and here would be a ninth”…and it’s only with difficulty that Emma convinces him that John Knightley is so taciturn and reserved that even seated at the table he might as well not be there at all. Throw a spoon in his direction, and it might just pass right through him.
But then Mr. Weston is forced to withdraw from the dinner due to business, so we’re back down to eight anyway. (See what I mean about meandering? We’re spending pages where paragraphs would do.)
The night of the party arrives. And here’s where Emma and Knightley fade into the wallpaper, and for once we get an Austen party scene delivered almost entirely through the agency of the also-rans. First up is John Knightley and Jane Fairfax, who spend a really mind-bogglingly long time talking about the former having encountered the latter walking in the rain earlier that morning, on an errand to the post office. The risks of walking in the rain versus the joy of connecting with the outside world through the post, are discussed at length, and charmingly; but not with tremendous verve.
At least not until Austen’s favorite buttinskies get hold of the subject. First up: Mr. Woodhouse, for whom walking to the post office in the rain is basically the equivalent of prancing across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
“I am very sorry to hear, Miss Fairfax, of your being out this morning in the rain. Young ladies should take care of themselves. Young ladies are delicate plants. They should take care of their health and their complexion. My dear, did you change your stockings?”
Then Mrs. Elton twigs to what’s under discussion, and grandstands superbly. “My dear Jane, what is this I hear?—Going to the post-office in the rain!...It is a sign I was not there to take care of you.” When Jane insists that she’s feeling perfectly fine, and for Christ’s sake would everyone just chill already, Mrs. Elton remains un-quailed.
“Oh! do not tell me. You really are a very sad girl, and do not know how to take care of yourself. To the post-office indeed! Mrs. Weston, did you ever hear the like? You and I must positively exert our authority.”
I love that Mrs. Elton is always lassoing people into backing up her “authority”. And it’s always the people who least want to have anything to do with her, though Mrs. Weston is too polite not to make at least a show of complying. But Mrs. Elton really doesn’t need any backup; she’s a one-woman SWAT team and now descends on Jane Fairfax with a voice full of artillery fire.
“I shall speak to Mr. E. The man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name) shall enquire for yours too and bring them to you. That will obviate all difficulties you know; and from us I really think, my dear Jane, you can have no scruple to accept such an accommodation.”
Dear Jane, quite the contrary, has a whole boatload of scruple to accept the accommodation, and says so. But it’s like arguing with a barking dog. Mrs. Elton just keeps repeating that the thing is done, henceforth so shall it be, I have decreed, kneel before your sovereign. Despite which Jane keeps declining the offer, politely but firmly (and we like her for it; she’s taking no bullshit).  
Eventually Jane gives up and just changes the subject. Her new topic: Isn’t the post office wonderful. (Jane needs a little help in the convivial small-talk department.) This eventually leads to a discussion of the difference between men’s and women’s handwriting, with clear props to the latter at the expense of the former. Emma, deciding to stick her head back into the novel that bears her name, considers taking the opportunity to bring up Frank Churchill. “Am I unequal to speaking his name at once before all these people?” she asks herself, which can only be rhetorical, because as if. “Is it necessary for me to use any roundabout phrase?—Your Yorkshire friend—your correspondent in Yorkshire;—that would be the way, I suppose, if I were very bad.” And Emma might be naughty, but never bad.
In the end, she just blurts it out: “Mr. Frank Churchill writes one of the best gentleman’s hands I ever saw.” This prompts Mr. Knightley to pop his head back into the novel too, so that he can counter, “I do not admire it…It is too small—wants strength. It is like a woman’s writing.” And when Emma threatens to fetch a sample of Frank’s handwriting to prove him wrong, he goes into a sulk. “Oh! when a gallant young man, like Mr. Frank Churchill…writes to a fair lady like Miss Woodhouse, he will, of course, put forth his best.”
I just love the schoolyard snark Mr. Knightley shows here. He’s one of my favorite characters, but it does crack me up that he’s so prickly on the subject of that gol’ durn smooth-talkin’ pretty boy Frank Churchill. You can practically see him cross his arms in a huff, then turn away and give the baseboard a surreptitious kick.
And just like that he’s back on the margins again. Emma lingers front and center a while longer, intrigued by the glow of contentment that Jane seems to be giving off, and wondering whether it’s due to having found word from a certain someone waiting for her at the post office after her infamous walk. Emma playfully considers saying something provocative—“She could have made an enquiry or two, as to the expedition and the expense of the Irish mails”—but then she remembers she’s supposed to be being nice to Jane, so she doesn’t follow through. And then, on the principle that if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all, she too shuffles off to the sidelines.
But that’s okay, because we’re now in for Round Two of the great Jane Fairfax vs. Mrs. Elton championship bout. It takes place after dinner, when the ladies retire to drawing room. They’re pretty evenly matched, but you can boil down the play-by-play to basically this:
            MRS. ELTON: It is high time you found a suitable position.             JANE: I have no intention of seeking a position just yet.             MRS. ELTON: I will find you the perfect position among people of quality.             JANE: I absolutely insist you not do that.
Repeat, with many variations, for four pages.
Mrs. Elton is of course utterly hilarious here, because Maple Grove Mr. Suckling Maple Grove, but the real surprise is that Jane holds her own and, as in the previous scene, shows a real spine and a steely determination. We’ve only really seen her through Emma’s eyes up to now, and as a result we’ve come to consider her a kind of pallid, cold fish; but this Jane has integrity. This Jane has fire.
“Excuse me, ma’am, but this is by no means my intention; I make no enquiry for myself, and should be sorry to have any made by my friends. When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where enquiry would soon produce something—offices for the sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect.”
“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.”
“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade…governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of its victims, I do not know where it lies.”
In my analysis of Mansfield Park I openly wondered about the extent of Jane Austen’s awareness of the slave trade that flourished in her era; Jane Fairfax’s remarks here—putting the misery of governesses on a level with the misery of slaves—might imply ignorance. Certainly African slaves could be subjected to physical indignities and cruelties far beyond what English law would allow to be inflicted on any governess. But I choose to see this passage rather as a rare flash of outrage in the Jane Austen canon…a protofeminist cri de coeur.
A little later, Mrs. Elton insists that Jane mustn’t work in an office, she needs to work for a rich family so that she can move “in certain circles” and “command the elegancies of life.” And Jane shoots back:
“You are very obliging; but as to all that I am very indifferent; it would be no object to me to be with the rich; my mortifications, I think, would only be the greater; I should suffer more from comparison. A gentleman’s family is all that I should condition for.”
So, yeah. Jane Fairfax, man. Totally throwin’ it down.
Eventually Mr. Woodhouse shows up—the first of the gentlemen to rejoin the ladies after their postprandial glass of sherry (or three, or seventeen)—and Mrs. Elton, whose ego is the size of one of the smaller moons of Jupiter, takes the venerable patriarch’s appearance as a compliment to herself. She half-whispers to Jane:
“Here comes this dear old beau of mine, I protest!—Only think of his gallantry in coming away before the other men!—what a dear creature he is!—I assure you I like him excessively…I wish you had heard his gallant speeches to me at dinner. Oh! I assure you I began to think my cara sposa would be absolutely jealous. I fancy I am rather a favourite; he took notice of my gown. How do you like it?—Selina’s choice—handsome, I think, but I do not know whether it is not over-trimmed. I have the greatest dislike to the idea of being over-trimmed—quite a horror of finery…”
And so on, and so forth. In full flow, Mrs. Elton can make Lady Catherine de Bourgh seem like a timid ingénue.
At this point the other gentlemen enter, and Mr. Weston as well, having returned from his business duties in time to join the party. Mr. John Knightley, whose preferred state of being is solitude and silence (in the 21st century, he’d have an isolation tank in his home, and immerse himself in it whenever Isabella and the kids were around), is completely astonished that “a man who might have spent his evening quietly at home after a day of business in London, should set off again, and walk half-a-mile to another man’s house, for the sake of being in mixed company till bed-time, of finishing his day in the efforts of civility and the noise of numbers”. He stares at Mr. Weston as though he were a carnival freak—conversing amiably, smiling, taking in the blather of women as though it were preferable to shutting himself up in a dark room and listening to the house settle—and sadly shakes his head, thinking, “I could not have believed it even of him.”
It isn’t long before we learn exactly why Mr. Weston traipsed that half-mile to Hartfield to put himself among actual human people again. He’s had a letter—he displays it with a flourish—from his son, Frank Churchill, announcing his return. Frank’s aunt—whose supposed illness was the reason the boy was prematurely yanked away from them the last time he visited—has decided London might suit her, so Frank will be near enough to Highbury to come and go as he pleases. Everyone is delighted by the news—or nearly everyone; Emma is “a little occupied in weighing her own feelings, and trying to understand the degree of her agitation, which she rather thought was considerable” (i.e., am I in love or am I not). And of course neither Mr. Woodhouse (who sees Frank as that reckless young daredevil who’s always throwing open windows) nor Mr. Knightley (who sees Frank as a pampered little Papillon who spends too much time yapping) is exactly doing a jig about it.
While Emma and Mr. Knightley are occupied with their private thoughts, the spotlight swivels back to the supporting cast, and we finally get the pièce de résistance. Mr. Weston pays his respects to Mrs. Elton, and the two of them begin an increasingly perilous game of one-upmanship that goes on for six pages—pages fraught with parries and thrusts and daring sallies and bold frontal assaults—before it’s finally interrupted. It’s one of Austen’s finest pieces of comic writing, and yes, she lets it run away with her a bit, but this time we’re enjoying it every bit as much as she is. I’d love to see this scene staged by two really fierce comic actors—say, Hugh Laurie and Catherine Tate. It would have the potential to actually incapacitate the audience.
The premise is this: Mr. Weston only wants to talk about his well-connected son Frank Churchill. Mrs. Elton only wants to talk about Maple Grove Mr. Suckling Maple Grove. So each of them has to pay close attention to what the other is saying, and be on the alert for even the tiniest opening that allows them to change the subject. Then, when the subject is changed, they have to be mindful of every syllable they utter, lest they give the other guy an excuse to change the subject back again. It’s dizzying and hilarious; a verbal football game.
When Mr. Weston mentions Frank’s residence at Enscombe, Mrs. Elton asks (in all apparent innocence) if that is in Yorkshire. Mr. Weston says, yes, about 190 miles from London. Which gives Mrs. Elton the opening she needed, to point out that this is sixty-five miles farther from London than Maple Grove, where her brother-in-law Mr. Suckling lives, and hemakes the trip twice in one week.
Mr. Weston grabs the ball back before Mrs. Elton can dash down the field with it, by pointing out that the distance isn’t so much the problem as Mrs. Churchill’s physical frailty, which makes it difficult for her to travel. Although now she’s feeling much improved, and is “so impatient to be in town, that she means to sleep only two nights on the road—so Frank writes word. Certainly delicate ladies must have very extraordinary constitutions, Mrs. Elton; you must grant me that.”
Mrs. Elton will grant him nothing, and in fact says Mrs. Churchill’s desire to sleep only two nights at an inn has nothing to do with her constitution and everything to do with the tackiness of inns, and by the way my sister Selina who is the wife of Mr. Suckling of Maple Grove always travels with her own sheets, “an excellent precaution. Does Mrs. Churchill do the same?”
“Depend upon it, Mrs. Churchill does every thing that any other fine lady ever did. Mrs. Churchill will not be second to any lady in the land for—”
Mrs. Elton eagerly interposed with,—
“Oh, Mr. Weston, do not mistake me. Selina is no fine lady, I assure you. Do not run away with such an idea.”
“Is not she? Then she is no rule for Mr. Churchill, who is as thorough a fine lady as any body ever beheld.”
Mrs. Elton began to think she had been wrong in disclaiming so warmly. It was by no means her object to have it believed that her sister was not a fine lady; perhaps there was was want of spirit in the pretence of it; and she was considering in what way she had best retract, when Mr. Weston went on.
But soon enough it’s her turn again, and she has the triumph of getting to bring Bath into the conversation (if Mrs. Churchill is so ill, why doesn’t she go there?) and it just keeps going on and on, back and forth, with Mr. Weston lobbing Enscombe and the Churchills at her, and Mrs. Elton firing back with Maple Grove and Bath and Selina. At one point, Mrs. Elton has control of the field and is roaring over it, but she “was stopped by a slight fit of coughing, and Mr. Weston instantly seized the opportunity of going on.”
A few pages later, Mr. Weston has—for various tactical reasons—shifted from praising Mrs. Churchill to complaining of her pride and arrogance, which are especially vexing because she “was nobody when (Mr. Churchill) married her, barely the daughter of a gentleman; but ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill’d them all in high and mighty claims: but in herself, I assure you, she is an upstart.” Which prompts my very favorite of all Mrs. Elton’s many delightful ripostes:
“Only think! Well, that must be infinitely provoking! I have quite a horror of upstarts.”
I confess, I had to put the book down, and then my head too, and make high-pitched whimpering noises for a few minutes. My dogs were understandably alarmed.
By this time, you can pretty well infer how smitten Austen is with her new creation. She has to work hard to prevent Mrs. Elton from just packing up the entire novel under her arm and carting if off to Maple Grove. (Or Bath.) In fact, it’s a testament to the genius of Mrs. Elton that simply placing her in a scene with a heretofore lightweight comic figure (Mr. Weston), improves him as well—forces him to rise to the occasion and become and comedic titan in his own rights. We can barely wait to see him again, after this.
But we will have to wait, because their conversation is now interrupted by the tea being carried in (inconveniently in the middle of a particularly energetic spate of Mr. Suckling this Mr. Suckling that), and then by half the party sitting down to cards. The other half is left to its own devices, and Emma suddenly finds herself sandwiched between the Knightley brothers. Instinctively she knows: no good can come of this.
John Knightley leads off, which isn’t a promising start, because he seemingly can’t be in the same room with Emma without launching into his favorite theme, i.e. “The problem with you.”
He begins neutrally enough, thanking her for agreeing to take care of his boys; but he goes on to beg her to send them back home if they become troublesome. Emma is surprised by this; what does he mean, “troublesome”? Only, he replies, that “they may be some incumbrance to you, if your visiting engagements continue to increase as much as they have done lately.”
As we’ve seen, visiting engagements are to John Knightley a trivial and silly business that are to be stoically endured until they can be escaped, like prison cells or flaming coaches. So we know—and Emma does too—that this is a barely veiled criticism. She denies that her engagements have increased at all, but then the other Knightley brother chimes in that of course they have, agreeing that, “The difference which Randalls, Randalls alone, makes in your goings-on is very great.”
She valiantly defends herself by fiercely insisting that her nephews will always be the number-one priority for Auntie Emma, more so than they would be for Uncle Knightley anyway, “who is absent from home about five hours where she is absent one; and who, when he is at home, is either reading to himself or settling his accounts.”
And so ends the second volume of this triple-decker. It’s a pretty lackluster attempt by our hero and heroine to re-take the novel; Emma mainly sputters, and Mr. Knightley barely speaks at all. They’re going to have to do better, if this whole thing isn’t going to wind up being retitled Augusta. Join me next time, and we’ll see how they manage.

Emma, chapters 31-33

So, almost 250 pages into this hugely popular novel by the supposed high priestess of literary romantics, its heroine is at long last in love. And what a dizzying, swirling, swooning, skies-fall-down-from-the-heavens thing it is, rendered in the most sumptuous, gorgeous, passionate prose imaginable.
Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first, she thought it was a good deal…she was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter…on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual; she was still busy and cheerful; and, pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine him to have faults…“Every consideration of the subject, in short, makes me thankful that my happiness is not more deeply involved. I shall do very well again after a little while—and then, it will be a good thing over; for they say every body is in love once in their lives, and I shall have been let off easy.”
Oh, the heaving bosoms, the gasps of surrender, the torrid coming together of two inflamed hearts. Jane Austen, ladies and gentlemen; I give you Jane Austen.
Seriously, though. Austen was—as I’ve noted before—a daughter of the Enlightenment, and a steely-eyed observer of human behavior. Nothing, to her, would be more ridiculous than the kind of harps-and-violins crap that you find in, oh, say, Hollywood versions of Jane Austen novels. (Think of that final makeout-session-in-nightshirts scene from the Kera Knightley Pride and Prejudice. Austen would have thrown popcorn at the screen. And missed, because her aim would be lousy due to laughing so hard.)
For Austen, romance is a minefield, and those who dash recklessly across it invariably lose a limb or two. (Think Lydia Bennet.) Hence Emma’s satisfaction in having “been let off easy” (“I am quite enough in love,” she says. “I should be sorry to be more”). As for the wedded estate, that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish from romance, although to treat it with too calculated an eye is a mistake as well. (Think Charlotte Lucas.) The goal—and yes, it is a tightrope act; hence the delicious tension that informs every Austen novel—is to transact a marital negotiation that allows a woman a degree of security and autonomy, with a partner whom she can stand most of the time and possibly even enjoy some of the time. Emma Woodhouse, alone of Austen’s heroines, already enjoys security and autonomy, and so has no need to risk the marriage crap shoot at all; hence her intention—once her little cat-and-mouse game with Frank Churchill has run its course—to send him packing. “Their affection was always to subside into friendship. Every thing tender and charming was to mark their parting; but still they were to part.”
But Emma’s sufficiently the egotist to feel pity for her spurned lover, who must after all face the unremittingly bleak prospect of living the remainder of his life without her in it. (Would suicide be too great a temptation? Probably not.) And so, like a disappointed game-show contestant, he must be given a consolation prize. And since Harriet Smith is pretty much Emma’s own personal white elephant by now, that’s whom she settles on—based on a line in a letter from Frank to his stepmother, in which he says, referring to his sudden departure, “I had not a spare moment on Tuesday, as you know, for Miss Woodhouse’s beautiful little friend. Pray make my excuses and adieus to her.”
Hell, we’ve seen Emma try to build dynasties on less than that. But, wait, she’s sworn to give up matchmaking after the Mr. Elton imbroglio. So she can’t backslide, right? “I must not dwell upon it,” she tells herself, while dwelling upon it. “I must not think of it. I know the danger of indulging such speculations.” And then a nanosecond later she’s planning Harriet’s trosseau.
Possibly she’d have managed a bit more intestinal fortitude, but for the imminent arrival of the aforementioned Mr. Elton and his new bride, which—now that Mr. Weston’s ball has been cancelled—is the only thing anyone in Highbury has to look forward to, in this sad, archaic world devoid of such satisfying sources of anticipation as the All-Star Game and the Breaking Badfinale. As it is, poor Harriet can’t stick her head out her bedroom door without someone barking “Mr. and Mrs. Elton!” at her, and as a result she’s “in a flutter of spirits which required all the reasonings, and soothings, and attentions of every kind that Emma could give.” Again, poor Emma, stuck in this archaic world that predates Xanax.
…[I]t was heavy work to be for ever convincing without producing any effect; for ever agreed to, without being able to make their opinions the same. Harriet listened submissively, and said, “it was very true; it was just as Miss Woodhouse described—it was not worth while to think about them,—and she would not think about them any longer.” But no change of subject could avail, and the next half hour saw her as anxious and restless about the Eltons as before.
So, yeah, hooking up Harriet with Frank Churchill is definitely a two birds, one stone kind of solution.
But Emma’s not ready to fork over Frank just yet; there’s still quite a bit of footsie left to play, when that gentleman finally hauls his sweetly filled breeches back to Highbury. In the meantime, Emma solves Harriet’s misery fits by essentially telling her, Listen, every time you go off about Mr. Elton, you make me feel guilty about my part in that whole crater-fest. Which horrifies Harriet: “You, who have been the best friend I ever had in my life!...I care for nobody as I do for you! Oh, Miss Woodhouse, how ungrateful I have been!” And more, much more, in the same vein! In fact, Harriet seems ready to spend the rest of the novel speaking exclusively in exclamation points! No, really!
Emma, graciously, finds this to be evidence of Harriet’s “warmth and tenderness of heart”—which, she reflects, her father has as well, and her sister Isabella too. Emma is sufficiently self-aware to know that no one will ever accuse her of the same qualities, and that in this respect, at least, Harriet is her superior—and certainly the superior of that cold fish, Jane Fairfax, who probably never spoke an exclamation point in her life. “Harriet is worth a hundred such; and for a wife—a sensible man’s wife—it is invaluable. I mention no names; but happy the man who changes Emma for Harriet!”
Then the man who refused to do just that arrives in town, and everyone gets a first chance to glimpse his better half at church on Sunday. But “curiosity could not be satisfied by a bride in a pew,” so the real sizing-up has to wait for the inevitable social calls. When Emma goes to the vicarage to pay hers, she takes Harriet along with her, in a kind of may-as-well-get-this-over-with gesture. And what with minding Harriet (who might, presumably, otherwise wet herself, or pull her dress over her head), and being back in that house where she’d once made such an ass of herself (breaking a bootlace to give Mr. Elton time to woo Harriet), and with the formalities of an introduction being all in the way on this first visit, Emma is so distracted that she comes away with nothing to say of Mrs. Elton other than that she’s “elegantly dressed, and very pleasing.”
That is, publicly.Privately, she has some pretty clear first impressions—and not favorable ones, either. “She was almost sure that for a young woman, a stranger, a bride, there was too much ease. (Mrs. Elton’s) person was rather good; her face not unpretty; but neither feature, nor air, nor voice, nor manner, was elegant.”
Then this follows:
As for Mr. Elton, his manner did not appear—but no, she would not permit a hasty or a witty word from herself about his manners. It was an awkward ceremony at any time to be receiving wedding-visits; and a man had need be all grace to acquit himself well through it. The woman was better off; she might have the assistance of fine clothes, and the privilege of bashfulness; but the man had only his own good sense to depend on: and when she considered how peculiarly unlucky poor Mr. Elton was in being in the same room at once with the woman he had just married, the woman he had wanted to marry, and the women whom he had been expected to marry, she must allow him to have the right to look as little wise, and to be as much affectedly, and as little really, easy as could be.
I’ve often praised the psychological nuance of Austen’s portrayals, and just as often compared it to Shakespeare’s; but I think here she even bests her codpiece-sporting forebear. Shakespeare wouldn’t have been able to resist making Mr. Elton a preening fool. Austen looks beyond that, and excuses him. Some people wonder how, in six novels set in the same constricted society and based on essentially the same narrow theme, Austen manages to earn immortality. The answer is: through paragraphs like this one.
Afterwards, Emma and Harriet deconstruct the visit, which basically involves Harriet praising everybody and nailing her hosannas down with a regular staple-gun of exclamation points. She won’t even mind seeing the couple again; she’s just so glad to know Mr. Elton hasn’t “thrown himself away” on a lesser woman. “Happy creature! He called her ‘Augusta.’ How delightful!”
Modern readers may wonder at this; after all, Augusta is her name. What the hell else should he call her? Larry? Old Paint? She-who-must-be-obeyed? But we forget that in Austen’s time it was proper for spouses to address each other formally in company. Mr. Elton ought to have called his wife “Mrs. Elton.” What Harriet found delightful, Austen meant her readers to find off-putting.
Eventually Mrs. Elton returns the visit, and Emma has plenty of time for her opinions to coalesce. And she really, really, reallydoes not like this chick. Not. One. Little. Bit.
..[T]he quarter of an hour quite convinced her that Mrs. Elton was a vain woman, extremely well satisfied with herself, and thinking much of her own importance; that she meant to shine and be very superior, but with manners which had been formed in a bad school, pert and familiar; that all her notions were drawn from one set of people, and one style of living; that, if not foolish, she was ignorant, and that her society would certainly do Mr. Elton no good.
But we, on the other hand, are thrilled by her, because this is the kind of Jane Austen character we love best: the self-important blowhard. Even better, Mrs. Elton’s self-esteem is supercharged by her connection to a rich brother-in-law, and by her familiarity with his estate, Maple Grove. Her first words on sitting down with Emma are about “My brother Mr. Suckling’s seat;” and, like Mr. Collins with Rosings, everything is thereafter compared to this yardstick of real-estate perfection. In fact, by the end of the visit Mrs. Elton has joined the exalted (by me, anyway) list of Austen characters who boast a priceless catch phrase—one you could put on a T-shirt. Mrs. Elton’s would read, ONE MIGHT ALMOST BE AT MAPLE GROVE.
To all this gush, Emma makes “as slight a reply as she could; but it was fully sufficient for Mrs. Elton, who only wanted to be talking herself.” And talk she does:
“So extremely like Maple Grove! And it is not merely the house; the grounds, I assure you, as far as I could observe, are strikingly like. The laurels at Maple Grove are in the same profusion as here, and stand very much in the same way,—just across the lawn; and I had a glimpse of a fine large tree, with a bench around it, which put me so exactly in mind! My brother and sister will be enchanted with this place. People who have extensive grounds themselves are always pleased with anything in the same style.”
Emma has doubts on that score, suspecting that “people who had extensive grounds themselves cared very little for the extensive grounds of anybody else”…but she decides it’s not worth the effort of saying so.
The conversation then moves on to the beauties of the countryside (which of course can’t compare to Surrey, home of—drumroll—Maple Grove—cymbal crash), but which is allowed its own quaint charm. In fact, Mrs. Elton’s venerable brother-in-law and sister have promised to come visit in the spring specifically to do some sightseeing.
“While they are with us, we shall explore a great deal, I dare say. They will have their barouche-landau, of course, which holds four perfectly; and therefore, without saying anything of our carriage, we should be able to explore the different beauties extremely well. They would hardly come in their chaise, I think, at that season of the year. Indeed, when the time draws on, I shall decidedly recommend their bringing the barouche-landau; it will be so very much preferable.”
After a few more paragraphs along these lines, you’re ready to add to Mrs. Elton’s T-shirt wardrobe, with a new one reading WE SHALL GO BY BAROUCHE-LANDAU.
Emma confesses that she and her intimates aren’t quite so familiar with the countryside, being “a very quiet set of people, I believe; more disposed to stay at home than engage in schemes of pleasure.”
And here’s where we realize that Mrs. Elton is one of those people who must always out-do anyone, in anything, anywhere, anytime. For she immediately shoots back that no one is more sedentary than she is, she practically languishes indoors, she is devoted to home, why her sister complains of the Herculean effort it takes just to get her out and into the barouche-landau.
Ye gods, how I love Mrs. Elton. What a wonderfully invigorating monster. She’s like three parts cyanide, one part champagne.
Mrs. Elton sympathizes with Emma’s inability to travel, but understands it, given the reports she’s heard of her father’s ill health. But, why doesn’t he go to Bath and take the waters? “I assure you I have no doubt of its doing Mr. Woodhouse good.” Emma replies that he has gone to Bath, more than once, and it did him no good at all; but she may as well say it in Klingon, or put her fingers to her temples and try to convey it telepathically, for all the effect it has on Mrs. Elton, who goes barreling on about the absolute certainty of Bath to cure whatever has made Mr. Woodward into Regency England’s most dedicated shut-in. And besides, it would be good for Emma herself.
“It would be a charming introduction for you, who have lived so secluded a life; and I could immediately secure you some of the best society in the place. A line from me would bring you a little host of acquaintance; and my particular friend, Mrs. Partridge, the lady I have always resided with when in Bath, would be most happy to show you any attentions, and would be the very person for you to go into public with.”
Emma has to summon all her resolve to keep from beating her visitor about the head with a pillow. “The idea of her being indebted to Mrs. Elton for what was called an introduction—of her going into public under the auspices of a friend of Mrs. Elton’s,—probably some vulgar, dashing widow, who, with the help of a boarder, just made a shift to live!—The dignity of Miss Woodhouse, of Hartfield, was sunk indeed!”
(Quick aside: How I’d love to have a novel about that “vulgar, dashing widow.” If I’m ever tempted do a so-called Austen “sequel”, that just may be my starting point.)
Emma strategically changes the subject to music, and mentions that she’s heard Mrs. Elton is “a superior performer.” Mrs. Elton denies this in a way that manages to imply she’s a prodigy, just a notch or two below Mozart, then segues into an interminable, cringe-inducing monologue about how very, very crucial music is to her, how she could do without anything—food, shelter, oxygen, the forgiveness of God at the final judgment—anything, as she told Mr. Elton when he proposed to her and mentioned the slightly reduced circumstances she would be forced to endure as his wife—but not the lack of a musical society. She must, must, must have music, do you hear me?—Austen doesn’t say, but possibly at the apex of this rant she grabs Emma’s forearms and gives her a good, solid shake.
She even manages, at one point, to mention she has been veryused to musical society both at Maple Grove and Bath, and it’s too bad she doesn’t find a way to fit the barouche-landau into the sentiment as well, but maybe if she did it would be too concentrated an essence of Augusta-ness and she’d just flat-out explode, like a microwaved soufflé.
It gets worse. Mrs. Elton has already visited Mrs. Weston, and is filled with praise for her—praise of the most backhanded variety, given that the lady in question was once Emma’s governess. “Having understood as much, I was rather astonished to find her so very lady-like. But she is really quite the gentlewoman.” You get the impression Mrs. Elton was amazed not to find Mrs. Weston running about the grounds barefoot, catching squirrels between her teeth. “And who do you think came in while we were there?” Mrs. Elton crows.
“Knightley!...Knightley himself!...I was really impatient to see him; and I must do my caro sposo the justice to say, that he need not be ashamed of his friend. Knightley is quite the gentleman; I like him very much. Decidedly, I think, a very gentlemanlike man.”
Fortunately, the visit now concludes and Mrs. Elton departs; five minutes longer might have found Emma stuffing her lifeless body up the chimney flu. “Insufferable woman!” she seethes. The idea of her calling him “Knightley”—she, who’d never even met him before. She might as well have called him “Cheeky Buns,” or “Hot Sauce.” And to be so gobsmacked to find that Mrs. Weston—her former governess—should be a gentlewoman! What, does Emma give the impression of having been reared by a fishwife? Emma’s dislike grows more volatile with every passing nanosecond.
“Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable!…A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E. and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery…Harriet is disgraced by any comparison. Oh! what would Frank Churchill say to her, if he were here? How angry and diverted he would be! Ah! there I am—thinking of him directly. Always the first person to be thought of! How I catch myself out!”
She’s catching something out, all right, but I’m not sure it’s herself.
Anyway, this roiling stream of consciousness is interrupted by her father, who, having finally “arranged himself, after the bustle of the Eltons’ departure” (I picture him circling his favorite chair several times before finally sitting in it, like a spaniel), now gives his opinion, which is that Mrs. Elton is a pretty enough little thing, but she “speaks too quick. A little quickness of voice there is which rather hurts the ear.”
Yeah, you can see where the two of them would grate against each other: Mrs. Elton, a vat of simmering acid; Mr. Woodhouse, a frigid, gaping void. How I’d love it if Austen trapped the two of them in a coal chute for an hour. The dialogue would practically write itself.
But though Emma’s opinion of Mrs. Elton couldn’t be worse if the wretched woman set Hartfield on fire, or shot all the staff execution style, it seems her new husband couldn’t be more delighted with her. “He had the air of congratulating himself on having brought such a woman to Highbury, as not even Miss Woodhouse could equal,” and the residents of Highbury not being, shall we say, the deepest spades in the plow shed, just accept Mr. Elton’s opinion of her—and her even more lofty opinion of herself. Soon enough she’s everybody favorite. You could sell goddamn keychains with her face on them; it’s that bad.
As if that weren’t enough, Emma’s firm rebuffing of all Mrs. Elton’s attempts at friendship have the effect of turning the lady against her. Possibly Emma, never having suffered rejection herself, doesn’t understand how it feels to be at the receiving end of that kind of shut-down—and how someone petty and small-minded (i.e. Mrs. Elton) might take it as a declaration of war. Within a few weeks, Mrs. Elton has grown positively frosty towards Emma; and while that’s just fine by Emma, who’d rather have her cutting her dead than yammering in her face, the change has a really lousy side effect. Unable to heap too much rudeness on Miss Woodhouse (because she is, ahem, Miss Woodhouse), Mrs. Elton settles for the next best thing: being rude to Miss Woodhouse’s friend.
Her manners too—and Mrs. Elton’s, were unpleasant towards Harriet. They were sneering and negligent. Emma hoped it must rapidly work Harriet’s cure; but the sensations which could prompt such behaviour sunk them both very much.—It was not to be doubted that poor Harriet’s attachment had been an offering to conjugal unreserve, and her own share in the story, under a coloring the least favorable to her and the most soothing to him, had in all likelihood been given also. She was, of course, the object of their joint dislike.
But as much as Mrs. Elton throws shade at Harriet, she throws sunshine on Jane Fairfax. Even before the breach with Emma, Mrs. Elton sort of loses her marbles for Jane, and is constantly peppering Emma with how the two of them must team up, like Superman and Batman, to promote the poor girl’s interests. “Miss Woodhouse, we must exert ourselves and endeavour to do something for her. We must bring her forward. Such talents as hers must not be suffered to remain unknown.” Emma replies that such a fate seems unlikely; with the Campbells as her friends and protectors, it’s not likely she’ll fall down a rabbit hole. But as usual, Mrs. Elton hears only white noise when anyone says something she doesn’t like. Jane Fairfax must be rescued, and that’s the goddamn end of it.
“She is very timid and silent. One can see that she feels the want of encouragement. I like her the better for it. I must confess it is a recommendation to me. I am a great advocate for timidity—and I am sure one does not often meet with it. But in those who are at all inferior, it is extremely prepossessing. Oh! I assure you, Jane Fairfax is a very delightful character, and interests me more than I can express.”
Emma, in a subtle little jab, mutters that she seems to be managing to express it very well. But Mrs. Elton doesn’t hear this, and just goes stampeding on about Jane Fairfax, and how Jane Fairfax will be constantly at her table and Jane Fairfax will be the recipient of all her bounty and Jane Fairfax this and Jane Fairfax that and oh by the way Maple Grove barouche-landau Bath and musical society, and have I forgotten anything, oh yes, Jane Fairfax.
“Poor Jane Fairfax!” Emma thinks, “you have not deserved this.” But the weird thing is, once Mrs. Elton’s plan gets put into action, Jane doesn’t appear to be a victim.
Emma’s only surprise was that Jane Fairfax should accept those attentions and tolerate Mrs. Elton as she seemed to do. She heard of her walking with the Eltons, sitting with the Eltons, spending a day with the Eltons! This was astonishing! She could not have believed it possible that the taste or the pride of Miss Fairfax could endure such society and friendship as the Vicarage had to offer.
It baffles Emma, because Jane is not only openly consorting with the Eltons; she’s also remaining in Highbury, even though intelligence has leaked out that the Campbells are peppering her with fresh invitations to join them in Ireland. In fact they’re flat-out urging her to come; if the technology existed, they’d send a chopper to literally pick her up. But Jane refuses to go. Refuses, even though staying means having to bear the godawful Eltons.
If Emma were a robot, we’d see smoke start to issue from her ears now, from a bad case of this-does-not-compute. So she goes to her closest friends—Mrs. Weston and Mr. Knightley—dumps it in their lap, and says, you make sense of it.
Which they do. Mrs. Weston points out that for Jane, anything—even the vicarage—might be preferable to being stuck at home all the time. And Mr. Knightley, going straight for the jugular (but in the nicestway possible), points out, while looking right at Emma, that Jane “receives attentions from Mrs. Elton, which nobody else pays her.”
Mrs. Weston adds that it might not be Jane who accepts Mrs. Elton’s invitations, anyway; it could be her aunt who does that, on her behalf. Because, let’s face it, someone could invite Miss Bates to take a refreshing step off the edge of the roof, and she’s the kind of woman who’d say why yes, how lovely, thank you, so very much obliged, and then down she’d go. (Probably talking the whole way.)
And then Mr. Knightley—in another of those astonishing psychological insights that mark Austen as stratospherically superior to all her legions of imitators—remarks that in all probability “Mrs. Elton does not talk to Miss Fairfax as she speaks ofher.”
“…[Y]ou may be sure that Miss Fairfax awes Mrs. Elton by her superiority both of mind and manner; and that, face to face, Mrs. Elton treats her with all the respect which she has a claim to. Such a woman as Jane Fairfax probably never fell in Mrs. Elton’s way before—and no degree of vanity can prevent her acknowledging her own comparative littleness in action, if not in consciousness.”
That’s a pretty satisfactory analysis…except for the way it resurrects all Emma’s suspicions of Mr. Knightley crushing super hard on Jane. In fact, Emma summons up her courage to point this out to him—to say, Listen how you talk about Jane Fairfax; maybe Mrs. Elton’s not the only one who wants to bundle her up and make off with her.
Mr. Knightley was hard at work upon the lower buttons his thick leather gaiters, and either the exertion of getting them together, or some other cause, brought the color into his face, as he answered,—
“Oh! are you there? But you are miserably behind-hand. Mr. Cole gave me a hint of it six weeks ago.”
I mention this because it’s such a wonderful image, and so writerly; the kind of detail that breathes naturalness into what might otherwise be an awkwardly arch exchange. Too many people see only the veneer in Austen—the Regency dress, the gently rolling hills, the carriages and furniture. But these are real people; pay attention and you can catch them sweating and stumbling, grunting and scratching.
Yet keeping up appearances through it all. As you do. (Or at least, as they do.)
Anyway, Mr. Knightley assures Emma, as he’s previously assured Mr. Cole, that he will never ask Jane Fairfax to marry him, nor would she have him if he did. And then he scolds Emma for matchmaking again.
Emma says she so isn’t matchmaking; she’d hate it if he married Jane Fairfax, because…because…uh, because then he wouldn’t be able to come and sit with them, the way he does now. Yeah. That’s it. The coming-and-sitting-with-us thing.
There’s a little more hashing over of Jane Fairfax’s qualities and Mrs. Elton’s lack of same; and more definitive denials from Mr. Knightley that he’d ever make a play for someone like Jane Fairfax, whose lack of “openness” is, for him, a deal-breaker. And when he finally—leather gaiters now fastened—hits the road and leaves the ladies behind, Emma turns in triumph to Mrs. Weston and says, alrighty then, what do you say about Mr. Knightley being hot for Jane Fairfax now?
“Why, really, dear Emma, I say that he is so very much occupied by the idea of notbeing in love with her, that I should not wonder if it were to end in his being so at last. Do not beat me.”
I’m not sure where that last bit comes from. Maybe Emma’s picked up a paperweight and taken a swing at Mrs. Weston. Or maybe they’re playing backgammon and Austen’s just forgot to mention it. But I think it’s likelier the paperweight.

Emma, chapters 28-30

When we last left our cast of characters, Miss Bates had ambushed them in the streets of Highbury and corralled them into coming up to the tiny Bates apartment to see the brand new piano that’s arrived as a gift for Jane Fairfax. When Emma and Harriet Smith enter the place, they find old Mrs. Bates, fast asleep, Jane Fairfax with her back turned (“intent on her piano-forte”, we’re told, and mm-hmm, you think so do you), and Frank Churchill still working away on repairing Mrs. Bates’s spectacles. Which causes Mrs. Weston to exclaim, “What!...have not you finished it yet? you would not earn a very good livelihood as a working silversmith at this rate.”
Frank might well shoot back that Mrs. Weston, who a few chapters back fancied herself a keen observer of human behavior, wouldn’t herself make much a living as a private dick, given that she’s failed to notice that, with Mrs. Bates happily sawing logs, Frank and Jane have been essentially alone for several minutes. But of course he won’t shoot that back, because he’s actually counting on Mrs. Weston’s density. Emma’s, too.
Instead he laughs it off and gets Emma to sit by him, and makes a big show of “looking out for the best baked apple for her, till Jane Fairfax was quite ready to sit down to the piano-forte again.” This is our first indication that Jane was previously not quite ready to sit down there, and it raises an eyebrow. Even our invincibly clueless heroine notices, and decides it must be because the piano is a secret gift from Jane’s secret heartthrob, Mr. Dixon, which makes her secretly overwhelmed to use it.
That (Jane) was not immediately ready, Emma did suspect to arise from the state of her nerves; she had not yet possessed the instrument long enough to touch it without emotion; she must reason herself into the power of performance; and Emma could not but pity such feelings, whatever their origin, and could not but resolve never to expose them to her neighbor again.
Jane begins playing, a tad hesitantly at first, but she soon gains confidence and power and concludes with a flourish; and of course everyone praises her mightily and tells her piano-playing is totally her mutant super-power and Jane says get out and they say no really we totally swear. But Frank can’t resist tweaking Jane by repeatedly commenting on the provenance of the pianoforte, harping on Colonel Campbell’s name with all the fiendish insistence of someone who knows perfectly damn well it wasn’t Colonel Campbell at all. Emma, appalled at his attempts to embarrass Jane, tries to shut him up by insisting that her fingering of Mr. Dixon was just “a random guess”, but Frank ain’t havin’ it.
He shook his head with a smile, and looked as if he had very little doubt and very little mercy. Soon afterwards he began again,—
“How much your friends in Ireland must be enjoying your pleasure on this occasion, Miss Fairfax. I dare say they often think of you, and wonder which will be the day, the precise day of the instrument’s coming to hand. Do you imagine Colonel Campbell knows the business to be going forward just at this time?...”
And so on, and so forth, with Jane’s looking increasingly like a pomegranate, and her body language suggesting she’d like nothing better than to launch herself under the settee…which she can’t do, alas, because Emma’s already crawled there, mortified by the way Frank has taken her nasty little conjecture and whittled it into poison darts to shoot at poor sad Jane.
At least, that’s what she thinks he’s doing. And on our first reading of the novel, we think so too. But never mind, he now finishes fixing the spectacles and returns them to Mrs. Bates, who has apparently awakened by this time, possibly by means of smelling salts; and freed of this task, he strides up to the piano and asks Jane to play something else—“asks” her, I say, but in a way that makes it clear if she refuses he’ll reach over and turn up her collar, or sit on her lap, or some other swift flash of violence.
“If you are very kind,” he adds, “it will be one of the waltzes we danced last night; let me live them over again. You did not enjoy them as I did; you appeared tired the whole time.” Hey, buddy, she’s got to be tired now, what with you incessantly yammering in her face. Frank finally shuts up when she begins playing, but is soon rifling through her collection of music and finds that he must—simply must—provide a capsule review of each item.
“And here are a new set of Irish melodies. That, from such a quarter, one might expect. This was all sent with the instrument. Very thoughtful of Colonel Campbell, was not it? He knew Miss Fairfax could have no music here. I honour that part of the attention particularly; it shows it to have been so thoroughly from the heart. Nothing hastily done; nothing incomplete. True affection only could have prompted it.”
Emma “wished he would be less pointed, yet could not help being amused;” but then she sees that Jane Fairfax, while admittedly smothered by a “deep blush of consciousness,” also wears “a smile of secret delight,” which makes Emma go all Victorian dowager and start chuffing in indignation that Jane was “apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings.” The very idea of smirking at Frank’s scampy conjuration of her illicit inamorato!...If Emma had a cane, she might give Jane a good swift thwack with it.
When Frank sits down again, Emma begs him to just please leave the hell off already.
“You speak too plain. She must understand you.”
“I hope she does. I would have her understand me. I am not in the least ashamed of my meaning.”
“But, really, I am half ashamed, and wish I had never taken up the idea.”
“I am very glad you did, and that you communicated it to me. I have now a key to all her odd looks and ways. Leave shame to her. If she does wrong, she ought to feel it.”
Frank is almost speaking double-Dutch here; by the time he finishes, you’re not quite sure who the she is that he’s talking about.
But Emma is saved from any more excruciating scenes, because Miss Bates now spots Mr. Knightley riding by and decides the most urgent thing in the entire world is that she immediately thank him for the use of his carriage the night before, even though she almost certainly thanked him sixty-five thousand times on the evening in question, and has probably already written him a thank-you note the approximate length of Atlas Shrugged.
She goes into the next room before she throws open the window, so as not to inconvenience anybody; and then she yells down into the street at Mr. Knightley with such shrillness that no one in the adjoining room can hear anything but her consonants ringing in their brainpans. After a brief exchange of courtesies she invites him up to see the sensational new piano, and he accepts; but then she breathlessly adds that Mrs. Weston and Frank Churchill are there as well, and at the sound of Frank’s name Mr. Knightley puts his hat back on and says, “Right, maybe not.” And he’d probably ride away at that exact moment, except that of course Miss Bates has a few parting words for him, just a very few, so that by the time he’s able to break away he has an ankle-length beard and Victoria is queen.
The rest of the visitors depart as well, signaling a chapter break, after which the author welcomes us back with one of those wonderful Austenian observations:
It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;—but when a beginning is made—when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt—it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.
And if there’s one quality we can’t ever ascribe to Frank Churchill, it’s heaviness. He means to dance again before he leaves Highbury, and he gets Emma (whose resistance isn’t exactly stiff) to sign on to the scheme by reminding her that when it comes to dancing (as opposed to singing) she can mop the floor with Jane Fairfax…though Emma tells herself that her keenness is “for simple dancing itself, without any of the wicked aids of vanity”, which shoots right to the top of her hit parade of all-time delusional asides.
Before you know it Frank and Emma are taking the opportunity of a dinner party at Randalls to bolt from the table and start pacing out the rooms to see if any of them will do as a dance floor; and fortunately Mr. and Mrs. Weston are the kind of people who are just fine with bright young things commandeering their house for a party without asking, and Mrs. Weston even volunteers to play for as long as the revelers wants to dance, while Mr. Weston…well, Austen doesn’t tell us, but possibly he offers to tear down and completely rebuild the house if none of the rooms quite fits the bill.
And in fact this seems to be the case, as no matter how many times Frank paces out the dimensions, they stubbornly remain the same. And in the process he earns Mrs. Woodhouse’s ire into the bargain, as the old man whispers to Mrs. Weston:
“That young man…is very thoughtless. Do not tell his father, but that young man is not quite the thing. He has been opening the doors very often this evening, and keeping them open very inconsiderately. He does not think of the draught. I do not mean to set you against him, but indeed he is not quite the thing.”
Eventually Frank decides, in the manner of a member of Congress, that the rooms he previously declared too small for five couples are in fact plenty big enough for twice that number.
“We were too magnificent,” said he. “We allowed unnecessary room. Ten couple may stand here very well.”
Emma demurred. “It would be a crowd—a sad crowd; and what could be worse than dancing without space to turn in?”
“Very true,” he gravely replied; “it was very bad.” But still he went on measuring, and still he ended with,—
“I think there will be very tolerable room for ten couple.”
“No, no,” said she, “you are quite unreasonable. It would be dreadful to be standing so close. Nothing can be farther from pleasure than to be dancing in a crowd—and a crowd in a little room.”
“There is no denying it,” he replied. “I agree with you exactly. A crowd in a little room—Miss Woodhouse, you have the art of giving pictures in a few words. Exquisite, quite exquisite! Still, however, having proceeded so far, one is unwilling to give the matter up. It would be a disappointment to my father—and altogether—I do not know that—I am rather of opinion that ten couple might stand here very well.”
This whole hilarious sequence reminds me of that old Groucho Marx musical number: “I’ll stay a week or two / I’ll stay the summer through / But I am telling you / I must be going.”
Emma, who’s unwilling to see anything in him but what suits her, “perceived that the nature of his gallantry was a little self-willed, and that he would rather oppose than lose the pleasure of dancing with her; but she took the compliment, and forgave the rest.” Yep, and that’s going to work out juuuust super for her.
Eventually they decide to hold the dance instead at the Crown Inn, which has plenty of space for ten couples, and the Westons even agree still to host (you have to wonder what, if anything, they wouldn’tagree to); but when Mr. Woodhouse hears of it, he nearly faints in horror. Dancing at the Crown Inn?...You might as well play Slip ‘N’ Slide on the Arctic tundra. “They would catch worse colds at the Crown than anywhere.”
Then Frank—who’s already on Mr. Woodhouse’s shit list for his nasty habit of opening doors—really puts his foot in it by saying that the Crown is actually safer than Randalls, so much so that “Mr. Perry might have reason to regret the alteration, but nobody else could.” The implication that Mr. Woodhouse’s adored physician might relish the idea of people getting sick and requiring his aid, gets the old man’s dander up; he defends Mr. Perry’s honor with so much fervor that the fellow might be his child bride, then demands to know from Mr. Frank Who-Asked-You-Anyway Churchill exactly how that drafty old Crown Inn is safer than toasty warm Randalls, hm?
“From the very circumstance of its being larger, sir,” Frank explains. “We shall have no occasion to open the windows at all”—and the concept of opening the windows is almost enough to strike Mr. Woodhouse stone dead. What is wrong with this young man and his obsession with opening things God meant to be closed?...Mr. Woodhouse is eventually, and laboriously, brought ‘round to the idea of the Crown, but you get the impression that if he’s ever left alone with Frank Churchill after this, he’ll arm himself with a musket. The boy is clearly lethal.
From here, the principals head out for an onsite survey of the Crown Inn, which they comb through with the thoroughness of a CSI team searching for DNA evidence. You’ve probably heard the old axiom, “Even Homer nods”—meaning, even a titanically gifted poet like Homer occasionally writes passages you’re tempted to skim rather than scan—or in fact, just skip entirely. And I gotta say, in this “Let’s check out the Crown Inn” sequence, Jane Austen nods like a busted bobble-head. I mean, after pages of discussion of every goddamn thing—including the wallpaper and the wainscoting—you think you’re maybe at the end of it; then someone says, “I think we do want a larger council. Suppose I go and invite Miss Bates to join us?”—and you realize you are well and truly doomed.
So let’s just jump ahead to the next chapter, after everything’s already been settled. The Crown Inn is booked, the date is fixed, Frank’s aunt (to Emma’s disbelief) has given him permission to extend his stay, and Frank himself has asked Emma for the first two dances. Everything is so happily squared away in Emma Land that there’s nothing to perturb or vex her…except Mr. Knightley’s complete indifference to the whole scheme. He maddeningly shrugs off every one of Emma’s breathless reports on its progress.
“Very well. If the Westons think it worth their while to be at all this trouble for a few hours of noisy entertainment, I have nothing to say against it, but that they shall not choose pleasures for me.—Oh, yes! I must be there; I could not refuse; and I will keep as much awake as I can; but I would rather be at home, looking over William Larkins’s weeks’ account; much rather, I confess.—Pleasure in seeing dancing!—not I, indeed,—I never look at it—I do not know who does.—Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different.”
You can almost see Emma grinding her teeth during all this, and feel her fight the compulsion to lash out and give him, oh, such a shove. But of course at this point she’s still maintaining the polite fiction that Mr. Knightley’s opinion on anything counts for exactly squat; and meanwhile, gratifyingly, anticipation of the ball has completely altered another of Emma’s usual nemeses: Jane Fairfax. That ordinarily taciturn gal “enjoyed the thought of it to an extraordinary degree. It made her animated—open-hearted: she voluntarily said,—”
“Oh! Miss Woodhouse, I hope nothing may happen to prevent the ball! What a disappointment it would be! I do look forward to it, I own, with very great pleasure.”
Jane Fairfax using three exclamation points in succession is so unprecedented a thing that, had anyone else heard it, they may have mistaken it for a seizure and forced open her jaw to make sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue.
But then—because, apparently, Jane Fairfax can’t ever be permitted to experience anything remotely resembling an unalloyed pleasure—“Two days of joyful security were immediately followed by the overthrow of every thing. A letter arrived from Mr. Churchill to urge his nephew’s instant return.” Frank’s aunt is, apparently, too ill to be without him. Though what good Frank Churchill might serve in a sick room is beyond me. I picture him seated twitchily by the bed, and repeatedly eyeing the door as though he might by force of will suck himself through it. No, this is pretty clearly a power play for Aunt Churchill; Frank as much as says so—“He knew her illnesses; they never occurred but for her own convenience.” She’s one of those controlling types who can’t bear the idea of anyone having a private thought outside her influence, and who uses her poor health as a means of preventing that. Sort of like Lady Catherine and Ann de Bourgh rolled into one.
So now Emma herself is thrown into a fury of exclamation points.
The loss of the ball—the loss of the young man—and all that the young man might be feeling!—It was too wretched!—Such a delightful evening as it would have been!—Every body so happy! and she and her partner the happiest!—“I said it would be so,” was the only consolation.
That Emma…always finding the silver lining. And as if being proved right about the nefarious aunt weren’t pleasurable enough, Frank gilds the lily by heaping praise on her prophetic powers (while, it should be noted, indulging in some serious exclamation-point-abuse of his own).
“Ah! That ball!—why did we wait for any thing?—why not seize the pleasure at once?—How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!—You told us it would be so.—Oh, Miss Woodhouse, why are you always so right?”
Emma admits that in this case she “would much rather have been merry than wise,” which is about the saddest thing to pass her lips during the entire novel. Because of course, in the usual run of things, when confronted with two conflicting imperatives, Emma is all about choosing both.
Still, I love this whole passage because it really crystallizes the characters of both Emma and Frank. If you were to design T-shirts for the pair of them, Emma’s would read I SAID IT WOULD BE SO, and Frank’s would read SEIZE THE PLEASURE AT ONCE.
But for now, he must be off; his father will be arriving for him at any second, to escort him away without delay. Emma is surprised. “Not five minutes to spare even for your friends Miss Fairfax and Miss Bates? How unlucky! Miss Bates’s powerful, argumentative mind might have strengthened yours.”
But Frank surprises her by not only not laughing at her jibe; but by admitting he’s already paid a call at the ladies’ door, only to find Miss Bates out.
“I felt it impossible not to wait till she came in. She is a woman that one may, that one mustlaugh at; but that one would not wish to slight. It was better to pay my visit, then—”
He hesitated, got up, walked to a window.
“In short,” said he, “perhaps, Miss Woodhouse—I think you can hardly be quite without suspicion.”—
He looked at her, as if wanting to read her thoughts. She hardly knew what to say. It seemed like the forerunner of something absolutely serious, which she did not wish.
She replies in a manner that doesn’t give him any room to maneuver; he sits down next to her and tries again to pry open the matter at hand, but she—convinced by his manner that he’s “more in love with her than (she) supposed”—doesn’t help him out even one little bit.
And then suddenly Mr. Weston is at the door to collect him, and the charged atmosphere dissipates. Frank warmly takes his leave, and is gone. “Emma felt so sorry to part, and foresaw so great a loss to their little society from his absence as to begin to be afraid of being too sorry, and feeling it too much.” As always, in Austen, there’s that instinctive distaste for extreme emotion; despite which, Emma can’t seem to avoid drifting back into choppy waters.
“…(H)e had almosttold her that he loved her. What strength, or what constancy of affection he might be subject to, was another point; but at present she could not doubt his having a decidedly warm admiration, a conscious preference of herself; and this persuasion, joined to all the rest, made her think that she must be a little in love with him, in spite of every previous determination against it.”
This conjecture is supported by a “sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, (a) disinclination to sit down and employ myself,” which is of course just what an abandoned lover would feel, right?
Poor Emma. She’s just clever enough to be constantly outwitting herself. How else to explain how she misses applying the same criterion to Jane Fairfax when next she sees her, and finds that “her composure was odious.”
She had been particularly unwell, however, suffering from headache to a degree, which made her aunt declare that, had the ball taken place, she did not think Jane could have attended it; and it was a charity to impute some of her unbecoming indifference to the languor of ill health.
She’d hoped to find Jane openly grieved by the loss of the ball; who knows, they might even have commiserated, and finally forged the bond everyone’s always expected them to have. Instead she finds Jane, as per usual, hooded and uncommunicative. And she looks no further than that. Emma can’t see real suffering even when it’s seated in front of her on a piano stool.
So really, the only character with “a conscious preference” for Emma is Emma herself. She accepts without question the dictates of her own desires. She’s willful, and spoiled, and stunted.
But that’s okay. There is a character hanging around who has an unconscious preference for her; but he’s going to have to wait a while longer to have it knocked into his head. And into hers as well.
In the meantime, we get the high consolation of a new character entering the narrative…the bride of Mr. Elton, in fact. And she is—what joy!—irredeemably, grotesquely, uproariously despicable. Batton down the hatches, there’s a gust of Augusta comin’!

Emma, chapters 25-27

The new chapter opens with the disconcerting news that Frank Churchill—apparently a proto-metrosexual—has skippered off to London, merely to get a haircut. “A sudden freak seemed to have seized him at breakfast,” we are told, and it takes us a moment to realize that this is a reference to a whim, and not to Miss Bates bursting in and throwing her arms about his legs.
The news somewhat puts the brakes on Emma’s Frank Churchill boosterism.
There was certainly no harm to his traveling sixteen miles twice over on such an errand; but there was an air of foppery and nonsense in it which she could not approve…Vanity, extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper, which must be doing something, good or bad; heedlessness as to the pleasure of his father and Mrs. Weston, indifferent as to how his conduct might appear; he became liable to all these charges.
All the same, she tries to dismiss the incident as a “little blot” on his otherwise sterling character, and his stepmother valiantly attempts to excuse it by observing that “all young people would have their little whims.” Neither woman really wants to give up so soon the idea of Frank as Emma’s special property—of being worthy of, in Emma’s opinion, “the honour, if not of being really in love with her, of being at least very near it, and saved only by her own indifference”. Which frame of mind, by comparison, makes prancing off to London for a haircut seem goddamn innocuous.
But there’s one local stalwart who’s not ready to excuse or explain or otherwise exempt him—one whose “spirit…was not to be softened, from its power of censure, by bows or smiles”—that being of course Mr. Knightley, who, on hearing of the caper, snorts, “Hum! just the trifling, silly fellow I took him for.” Emma has a brief urge to come to Frank’s defense, but realizes Mr. Knightley’s snarky put-down was “said only to relieve his own feelings, and not meant to provoke, and therefore she let it pass.” Though it’s just as likely she doesn’t really want to bite off more than she can chew. You can almost imagine her thinking, Oh no, if I champion Frank now, how will I look if tomorrow he does something else, like climb onto the breakfast table for a nap, or throw his best shoes into the fire?
And besides, she’s already got her hands full with another difficulty entirely. There’s a family in town, the Coles, who are “very good sort of people, friendly, liberal, and unpretending; but, on the other hand, they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel.” So of course Emma can’t be expected to socialize with them, lest their molecules affix to her and turn her into a troglodyte too, or something. (Don’t ask me to understand 18th century social anxiety. Just allow me to laugh at it.)
But oh dear, the unthinkable has come to pass, in that the Coles’ trade has recently prospered and propelled them up in the world, so that they’ve “added to their house, to their number of servants, to their expenses of every sort; and by this time were, in fortune and style of living, second only to the family at Hartfield.” That’s right, the plebes are nipping at Emma’s well-shod heels. Even worse, their “love of society, and their new dining-room, prepared every body for their keeping dinner-company,” and in fact they’ve thrown a few soirées already, and quite creditably too; no yaks roasted on a spit or blood-drinking or anything.
So it’s been inevitable that these low-born pretenders would eventually presume to send invitations to the area’s premier households—Donwell, Hartfield, Randalls—though Emma, for her part, has been absolutely determined to refuse any such brazen breach of decency. Still, she’s worried that her father’s reputation as a recluse “would be giving her refusal less meaning than she could wish”—i.e., that her sending regrets would be seen as a function of Mr. Woodhouse’s immobility, not of the complete horror of how dare you. That’s our Emma, right there: she doesn’t just want to say no…she wants to say no and make it hurt.
Which is why the wind goes out of her sails when invitations from the Coles arrive at Donwell and Randalls…and none at all comes to Hartfield. Emma has worked herself up into such a pitch of indignation over an expected offer of hospitality, that she doesn’t know how to react when the insult doesn’t come. She feels a sting of…can it be?...rejection.
…Mrs. Weston’s accounting for it with “I suppose they will not take the liberty with you; they know you do not dine out,” was not quite sufficient. She felt that she should like to have had the power of refusal; and afterwards, as the idea of the party to be assembled there, consisting precisely of those whose society was dearest to her, occurred again and again, she did not know that she might not have been tempted to accept…Might not the evening end in a dance?...The bare possibility of it acted as a further irritation on her spirits; and her being left in solitary grandeur, even supposing the omission to be intended as a compliment, was but poor comfort.
This right here is the joy of Emma: over and over again, we have the pleasure of watching our heroine confidently set sail on the seas of bitchery, only to immediately start taking on water.
But then—right in the midst of the Frank-Churchill’s-haircut imbroglio—an invitation finally shows up at Hartfield. Emma has the pleasure of reading it in front of the Westons and remarking that “of course it must be declined,” and then of allowing them to convince her otherwise. Her majestic condescension in accepting is also rewarded by the Coles’ explanation for the delay in asking her; they were merely awaiting “the arrival of a folding screen from London, which they hoped might keep Mr. Woodhouse from any draught of air,” which shows endearing awareness on their part that for the gentleman in question every draft of air is as toxic as whiff of Agent Orange. Emma, pleased by their deference, finds herself “very persuadable;” but despite the folding screen her father remains the opposite, and he makes a small-scale fuss about the perverse way everyone insists on hurtling out into the cold and damp, going places and doing things and seeing each other just for the sake of seeing each other, and really wouldn’t it be better if everyone just sat quietly by a fire and listened for irregularities in their bowel functions.
In fact he only gives his consent for Emma to go on the condition that she come home early—“You will not like staying late. You will get very tired when tea is over”—and everyone scrambles to find an argument to persuade him otherwise, with Mr. Weston finally hitting on the winner: that the Coles will be mortified if the great Miss Woodhouse hurries away from their party at the first opportunity.
“Mr. Weston, I am much obliged to you for reminding me. I should be extremely sorry to be giving them any pain. I know what worthy people they are. Perry tells me that Mr. Cole never touches malt liquor. You would not think it to look at him, but he is bilious—Mr. Cole is very bilious. No, I would not be the means of giving them any pain.”
Hilarious little flourishes like this are the first things to be cut in any Jane Austen film or TV adaptation; but the surgery kills the patient, in my humble opinion. These leitmotif-like character bits are what give her work the texture and complexity that have earned her such acclaim as a ruthless comic genius. Without them, she’s just plot…plot, and pretty costumes.
So it’s all settled by the time Frank returns, newly and smartly shorn. He “laughed at himself with a very good grace, but without seeming really at all ashamed of what he had done,” which so charms and confuses Emma that she has to twist herself into ethical knots to justify it.
“I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.”
One of the many wonderful things about this sentiment is that Emma could absolutely be talking about herself. Certainly more so than about Frank, as we’ll realize later, when it becomes clear that his spur-of-the-moment excursion to London was about something quite different from a haircut.
At any rate, Emma’s now eagerly looking forward to seeing Frank at the Coles’ party, and “of judging his general manners, and, by inference, of the meaning of his manners towards herself; of guessing how soon it might be necessary for her to throw coldness into her air; and of fancying what the observations of all those might be, who were now seeing them together for the first time.” She’s so much the anti-Fanny Price at moments like these: exulting in the idea of toying with another human being, and relishing the idea of having an audience for it into the bargain. She’s part actress, part cat, part dominatrix. Of course we love her. Especially when she ladles on a dollop of unflinching self-awareness, as in looking forward to the Coles’ party “without being able to forget that among the failings of Mr. Elton, even in the days of his favour, none had disturbed her more than his propensity to dine with Mr. Cole.”
The night of the party arrives. Things begin promisingly—for us, too—as Emma’s carriage arrives at the Coles’ on the heels (or rather the wheels) of another, which turns out to belong to Mr. Knightley. Emma is pleased to see this because in her opinion Mr. Knightley doesn’t “use his carriage so often as became the owner of Donwell Abbey”, preferring to stride manfully about the neighborhood on his own pair of muscular legs, which is just a bit too Robert Martin-ish for comfort.
She compliments him on finally conducting himself like a gentleman should, and then there’s another spate of crystalline dialogue between them, of the kind that makes lesser novelists (like yours truly) just want to put down their pens and give up, because what’s even the point.
He thanked her, observing, “How lucky that we should arrive at the same moment; for, if we had met first in the drawing-room, I doubt whether you would have discerned me to be more of a gentleman than usual. You might not have distinguished how I came by my look or manner.”
“Yes, I should; I am sure I should. There is always a look of consciousness or bustle when people come in a way which they know to be beneath them. You think you carry it off very well, I dare say; but with you it is a sort of bravado, an air of affected unconcern: I always observe it whenever I meet you under those circumstances. Now you have nothing to try for. You are not afraid of being supposed ashamed. You are not striving to look taller than any body else. Now I shall really be very happy to walk into the same room with you.”
“Nonsensical girl!” was his reply, but not at all in anger.
Wow. Just get them a room, already.
But no, Emma’s still too much an idiot to realize what she’s got on hand in Mr. Knightley, and instead turns all her nearly lethal coquettishness on Frank Churchill, who’s already arrived, and next to whom she finds herself seated at dinner—“as she firmly believed, not without some dexterity on his side.”
During the meal, Mrs. Cole drops a bombshell—well, a bombshell by Highbury standards (and remember this is the town in which the news of Mr. Elton’s engagement had people nearly running mad in the streets)—which is that she’s paid a call on the Bates ladies, and on entering their apartment was confronted by an impressively large new pianoforte. Miss Bates, all a-twitter, had explained that it arrived for Jane only the day before, “to the great astonishment of both aunt and niece, entirely unexpected”. A great deal of consideration had then been given as to who might have sent it (and knowing the exhaustive mind of Miss Bates, she no doubt had to propose and then reject every last property-owning male in the British Isles, and possibly the entire western hemisphere) before determining that it must have come from Colonel Campbell.
This conclusion is readily accepted by the assembled guests, though not without a few expressions of surprise that someone of Colonel Campbell’s dignity would stoop to surprising the ladies with so substantial a gift (I picture Miss Bates and Jane having to squeeze past it to get from one room to another, and the less flexible Mrs. Bates just resigning herself to being trapped permanently in her drawing room until the day she finally meets the Reaper).
But Emma has her own ideas. And when Frank sees the coy smile on her face, he demands to know what’s behind it; and she hints and feints, and he presses and teases—and I have to say, their little flirtatious dance around each other is lively and diverting enough, but doesn’t have even a fraction of the erotic zing of Emma’s sparring matches with Knightley.
Finally, Emma admits what’s on her mind: that Jane Fairfax’s benefactor was not Colonel Campbell. Frank presses her further, and she leans in and says, “What do you say to Mrs. Dixon?” Frank admits that he hadn’t thought along those lines, but certainly Mrs. Dixon would more likely be aware of Jane’s need of a piano, and also sending it without warning “is more like a young woman’s scheme than an elderly man’s.” And when she’s got Frank this far, Emma tells him to “extend your suspicions, and comprehend Mr. Dixon in them.”
“I do not mean to reflect upon the good intentions of either Mr. Dixon or Miss Fairfax; but I cannot help suspecting either that, after making his proposals to her friend, he had the misfortune to fall in love with her, or he became conscious of a little attachment on her side. One might guess twenty things without guessing exactly the right; but I am sure there must be a particular cause for her choosing to come to Highbury, instead of going with the Campbells to Ireland. Here, she must be leading a life of privation and penance; there it would have been all enjoyment.”
She then brings up Mr. Dixon’s having saved Jane’s life when she was nearly knocked into the water during the sailing party, and Frank surprises her by revealing that he was there. “Were you really? Well! But you observed nothing, of course, for it seems to be a new idea to you. If I had been there, I think I should have made some discoveries.”
Frank says he just bets she would; and what’s wonderful about this chapter is that it works so well, whether you’re reading it for the first time, or rereading it. Because yes, it’s a wonderful portrait of a feline schemer toying with a potential victim; but depending on which go-‘round this is for you, the angle from which you see it couldn’t be more different.
At this point their conversation is interrupted and they’re “called on to share in the awkwardness of a rather long interval between the courses, and obliged to be as formal and as orderly as others;” which is just Austen’s masterful pacing at work. She’s engaging in a little tension-and-release, making us wait—as Emma herself must wait—till she and Frank can turn back to private whispers about Jane Fairfax.
When that happens, Frank gratifies her by surrendering completely. He bows to her conclusions and exalts her ability at ferreting out the truth, and admits that he can now see the gift of the pianoforte “in no other light than as an offering of love”—which, again, reads entirely differently depending on whether you’ve read the novel before. Austen, more than a tad feline herself, is gleefully toying with us.
Then the meal ends, and the ladies—as convention dictates—leave the gentlemen at the table and head for the drawing-room, where they’re joined by a part of less worthy women who have only been invited to come by after the dinner is over. These include Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax, and Harriet Smith—the latter of whose sweet, good-natured, really-scarcely-tragic-at-all behavior drop-kicks Emma into a squall of pity; for she alone knows how many tears Harriet has shed lately, and how bravely she’s putting up a front of cheerfulness.
Jane Fairfax did look and move superior; but Emma suspected she might have been glad to change feelings with Harriet,—very glad to have purchased the mortification of having loved—yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton in vain,—by the surrender of all the dangerous pleasure of knowing herself beloved by the husband of her friend.
Emma here is prefiguring Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen’s next-published novel, Northanger Abbey, who will be in the unfortunate habit of imagining lurid histories for all those around her. Emma’s usually more sensible than this, and has the benefit of those closest to her—Mrs. Weston, Mr. Knightley—possessing the common sense to stop her when she gets on this track. But she’s just spent an entire dinner with Frank Churchill actively shoveling coal into her engine, so she’s surging ahead, going right off the rails.
Emma does not approach Jane, not wishing “to speak of the piano-forte, she felt too much in the secret herself, to think the appearance of curiosity or interest fair,” though she certainly gets a charge out of “the blush of guilt” that covers Jane’s face when she’s forced to acknowledge “my excellent friend Colonel Campbell.” And there’s even more enjoyment to be had:
Emma could not help being amused at (Mrs. Weston’s) perseverance in dwelling on the subject; and having so much to ask and to say as to tone, touch, and pedal, totally unsuspicious of that wish of saying as little about it as possible, which she plainly read in the fair heroine’s countenance.
Emma’s having so much fun at everyone else’s expense that you might find yourself wondering why she doesn’t stop for a minute and check herself. Well, here’s the answer striding through the door: Frank Churchill, “the first and the handsomest” of the men coming to join them, who “after paying his compliments en passantto Miss Bates and her niece, made his way to the opposite side of the circle, where sat Miss Woodhouse; and till he could find a seat by her, would not sit at all.” Emma totally grooves on this, knowing what everyone must be thinking: that she is Frank Churchill’s total crush monkey.
Frank’s in a good mood; he expounds on the many joys of Highbury, contrasting them to the dullness of his home at Enscombe, so that “Emma began to feel she had been used to despise the place rather too much”. His paeans are interrupted by the arrival of the other gentlemen, which causes a momentary confusion as they file into the room and take their places; after which Emma finds Frank staring across the room at Jane Fairfax. She snaps him out of it.
“Thank you for rousing me,” he replied. “I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw anything so outrée! Those curls! This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her. I must go and ask her whether it is an Irish fashion. Shall I?—Yes, I will—I declare I will—and you will she how she takes it;—whether she colours.”
In fact Emma doesn’t see whether she colors, because Frank stands in front of her, blocking her view; and before she can move to a more advantageous post, Mrs. Weston swoops in and takes Frank’s chair next to her. Mrs. Weston is, a bit uncharacteristically, worked up into a kind of giddy lather. “I have been making discoveries and forming plans, just like yourself,” she tells Emma, which is a little alarming for us to read; it’s like Alice’s elder sister following her down the rabbit hole, and grabbing the Eat Me cake from right out of her hands.
Mrs. Weston breathlessly confides her news, which is that Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax were brought to the Coles’ in Mr. Knightley’s carriage, and would be taken home again the same way. “I am very much inclined to think that it was for their accommodation the carriage was used at all,” she says. “I do suspect he would not have had a pair of horses for himself, and that it was only as an excuse for assisting them.”
Emma can’t but agree. “He is not a gallant man, but he is a very humane one; and this, considering Jane Fairfax’s ill health, would appear a case of humanity to him”—though it does seem to irk her a little that, when she gently mocked for having used horses tonight, he didn’t say a word about the real reason he did so.
Mrs. Weston, however, isn’t so sure that this is evidence of Mr. Knightley’s “humanity.” She thinks there’s something more at work—quite a bit more, in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, know-what-I-mean kind of way. “In short, I have made a match between Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax. See the consequence of keeping you company!—What do you say to it?”
What Emma has to say to it is: no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Also, NO. Plus, for added emphasis, Absolutely no-freaking-way are-you-high-or-just-crazy. “I am amazed that you should think of such a thing,” she sputters, with all the indignation of someone who wishes people would just leave these things to professionals.
She goes on to point out the “imprudence” of the match, and snorts, “Jane Fairfax mistress of the Abbey! Oh no, no;—every feeling revolts. For his own sake, I would not have him do so mad a thing.” She continues:
“But Mr. Knightley does not want to marry. I am sure he has not the least idea of it. Do not put it into his head. Why should he marry? He is as happy as possible by himself; with his farm, and his sheep, and his library, and all the parish to manage; and he is extremely fond of his brother’s children. He has no occasion to marry, either to fill up his time or his heart.”
This is the classic reaction of a romantic blockhead: she has no idea of wanting Mr. Knightley for herself, yet she can’t bear the thought that anyone else would have him instead. (It’s also the classic reaction of a selfish six-year-old. “No, I’m not using the green crayon right now, but that doesn’t mean youcan.”)
Mrs. Weston isn’t at all chastened by Emma’s poo-pooing of her fine detective work. In fact she has more to say, to bolster her case…such as, that Mr. Knightley has always been such an unabashed fan of Jane Fairfax’s singing. “I have heard him say, that he could listen to her for ever. Oh, and I had almost forgotten one idea that occurred to me”, and here you can picture her scooting her chair closer to whisper her suspicion into Emma’s ear, which is that Mr. Knightley, not Colonel Campbell, is the mysterious benefactor of the pianoforte. “I think he is just the person to do it, even without being in love.”
“Then it can be no argument to prove that he is in love,” Emma shoots back, scoring a point. But it’s Mrs. Weston’s who’s scored a hit, because despite her bravado, Emma really is shaken by this idea that Mr. Knightley might in fact be harboring a secret passion for Jane, even to the point of doing something so uncharacteristic as sending her a great big thunderous piano wrapped in a bow.
Emma is now called away to perform on the Coles’ own piano, and she “knew the limitations of her own powers too well to attempt more than she could perform with credit”—though it isn’t long before she’s given a helping hand, as Frank Churchill leaps up and starts belting out harmony for her. “Her pardon was duly begged at the close of the song, and every thing usual followed”, meaning that everyone says Oh Frank how well you sing and Frank says No I totally suck and they say Really we mean it you’re just the tits and Frank goes all blushy and says Stop.
Then Jane Fairfax is called to the bench, and her playing and singing are so incomparably better than Emma’s, that Emma herself sort of sinks into her chair, not quite in a sulk, but not quite not, either. And then…Frank Churchill catapults up to the piano again and starts warbling and gesticulating and, God only knows, walking on his hands like a trained seal.
Emma looks to Mr. Knightley, to see how he’s reacting—both to Jane’s singing and Frank’s grandstanding—and while she’s staring at him, he catches her at it, and comes over and sits next to her. During the break between songs, they chat noncommittally about Jane’s performance, but Emma can’t resist trying to draw out of him something that will put her mind to rest on the subject of Jane Fairfax having lassoed his heart like some Regency Annie Oakley. “This present from the Campbells,” she says, watching him carefully for his reaction, “this piano-forte is very kindly given.”
“Yes,” he replied, and without the smallest embarrassment. “But they would have done better had they given her notice of it. Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. I should have expected better judgment in Colonel Campbell.”
So there’s that. Emma is satisfied…but as Jane begins her second song, she realizes that while Mr. Knightley has pretty much cleared himself of being Jane’s Secret Santa, that doesn’t mean he isn’t still warm for her form. And in fact, when Jane is subsequently begged for a third song, Mr. Knightley throws some fuel on that fire by being the only on in the room who puts his foot down and says for God’s sake leave the poor woman alone, you’ll wear her out. He even snarls at Jane’s hapless aunt: “Miss Bates, are you mad, to let your niece sing herself hoarse in this manner? Go, and interfere. They have no mercy on her.”
So Emma’s left wondering. Because this could just be Mr. Knightley being his usual stand-up-guy self. Or…it could be something else.
No time to dwell on it, because suddenly all the furniture is pushed to the walls and the dancing portion of the evening begins. Emma watches keenly to see if Mr. Knightley—no twinkletoes as a rule—asks Jane to dance; but he doesn’t. So, sigh, relief. Emma can contentedly go and shake her booty with Frank Churchill.
After two dances, however, the whole thing is shut down because of the lateness of the hour. “Perhaps it is as well,” Frank says as he escorts Emma to her carriage. “I must have asked Miss Fairfax, and her languid dancing would not have agreed with me after yours.”
Oh, that Frank. He’s got balls of titanium, pardon my French.
Emma, we’re told, “did not repent her condescension in going to the Coles”, and in fact basks in the warm glow of all the fun she’s had, besides which “all that she might be supposed to have lost on the side of dignified seclusion must be amply repaid by the splendour of popularity.” That’s our Emma; it really is all about her. And her great triumph is in that she “must have delighted the Coles—worthy people, who deserved to be made happy!—and left a name behind her that would not soon die away.”
We may love her to smithereens, but we’re sogoing to enjoy her inevitable tumble into the tar pit.
She does win our sympathy back a bit by regretting how avidly she gossiped about Jane Fairfax with Frank, betraying her suspicions of Jane’s secret illicit feelings for Mr. Dixon. We’ve all been in a similar situation—realizing, the next morning, that we shot our mouth off more than we should have, under the influence of alcohol or bad company (there are Frank Churchills everywhere). So we feel for her.
Her other regret is of how her own playing and singing came off against Jane’s; and it doesn’t even help that Harriet Smith now traipses in to Hartfield and says the exact opposite. Emma chides her: “My playing is no more like (Jane’s) than a lamp is like sunshine.” But Harriet, whose musical taste is pretty much nonexistent (today she’d listen to Lite Rock FM and have every Taylor Swift CD ever made) doesn’t see it that way. Anyway, “I hate Italian singing; there is no understanding a word of it. Besides, if (Jane) does play so very well, you know, it is no more than she is obliged to do, because she will have to teach.”
But Harriet can’t be bothered to stay on the subject, because she has some much more urgent news to report, picked up at the party the night before, which is that Robert Martin has been dining with a family called the Coxes who have a pair of daughters, either of whom “would be very glad to marry him”, as who wouldn’t, frankly. (Hell, I’d marry Robert Martin.)
Emma shuts down the subject by dismissing the Coxes as “without exception, the most vulgar girls in Highbury.” But even so, she feels compelled to strap on her bonnet and accompany Harriet on her morning shopping; because there’s an outside chance she might run into one or more Martins herself, and “in her present state, (that) would be dangerous.”
Harriet, at Ford’s shop, is “tempted by every thing, and swayed by half a word”. Of course she can’t make a decision; when can she ever? It’s amazing the woman can swallow food without being commanded to. Emma, to save her sanity, slips outside the take in the view.
…(W)hen her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from the shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough: quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
I quote this in full only because, in this passage, I think Emma is closest to her creator. I always think that this, right here, is pretty much the way Austen herself approached the world.
But then Emma looks down the Randalls road and sees Mrs. Weston and Frank approaching. They’re on their way to Hartfield, but first Mrs. Weston means to call on the Bateses. “For my companion tells me,” said she, “that I absolutely promised Miss Bates last night that I would come this morning. I was not aware of it myself. I did not know that I had fixed a day; but as he says I did, I am going now.” Another of the many passages that read differently your second time through the novel.
Frank, who’s an absolute master (he plays everyone like a fiddle) says he’ll now accompany Emma back to Hartfield and await Mrs. Weston there, and Mrs. Weston’s suddenly all, Hey, you’re not leaving mealone with the Bateses, buster. Frank maintains he never meant to pay the call with her, but allows himself, with great reluctance (mmmm-hm), to be persuaded.
Emma returns to the shop, where Harriet has finally decided on some plain muslin and a riband; but then there’s a full page of business on whether the package should be sent to Mrs. Goddard’s or Hartfield; or whether just the muslin should be sent to Hartfield and the riband to Mrs. Goddard’s, or vice-versa; until Emma has to step in and make the call for her, which is a good thing, because otherwise Harriet’s skeletal remains would still be draped over the dusty, cobwebby Fords counter, her jawbone clacking against her skull, Mrs. Goddard’s…Hartfield…Mrs. Goddard’s…Hartfield…
The two young women are just leaving the shop when they’re waylaid by Miss Bates—seriously, she swoops down on them like a great bird of prey; I’m pretty sure Harriet is knocked to her knees—with Mrs. Weston fluttering up behind. Miss Bates then assails them with pleas to join her other guests, and really, an invitation has never seemed more like a cudgel than it does here.
“My dear Miss Woodhouse…I am just run across to entreat the favor of you to come and sit down with us a little while, and give us your opinion of our new instrument—you and Miss Smith. How do you do, Miss Smith?—Very well, I thank you.—And I begged Mrs. Weston to come with me, that I might be sure of succeeding.”
“I hope Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Fairfax are—”
“Very well, I am much obliged to you. My mother is delightfully well; and Jane caught no cold last night. How is Mr. Woodhouse? I am so glad to hear such a good account. Mrs. Weston told me you were here.—Oh, then, said I, I must run across; I am sure Miss Woodhouse will allow me just to run across and entreat her to come in…”
And she’s off like a rocket, streaking her way across nearly five pages with scarcely a paragraph break—with scarcely punctuation—and the phrase “talking a blue streak” never seemed more apt.
What we have here, ladies and gents, is the longest sustained comic monologue in the entire Austen canon, and as you well know by now, that is no small deal. This tsunami of verbiage is so gasp-inducingly breakneak, so hilariously inconsequential in every exhaustively delivered detail, so head-spinningly filled with nonsequiturs shot off like firecrackers, that it catapults Miss Bates easily—easily—to the top of the heap: she’s Austen’s all time champion talker. Compared to her, Mrs. Jennings and Lady Catherine de Bourgh are downright taciturn.
Really, just flip through the pages and dip in anywhere, and you’re treated with a virtuoso comic performance.
“I declare I cannot recollect what I was talking of. Oh, my mother’s spectacles. So very obliging of Mr. Frank Churchill. ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘I do think I can fasten the rivet; I like a job of this kind excessively.’ Which, you know, showed him to be so very—Indeed I must say that, much as I had heard of him before, and much as I had expected, he very far exceeds any thing—I do congratulate you, Mrs. Weston, most warmly. He seems every thing the fondest parent could— ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘I can fasten the rivet. I like a job of that sort excessively.’ I never shall forget his manner. And when I brought out the baked apples from the closet, and hoped our friends would be so very obliging as to take some, ‘Oh!’ said he directly, ‘there is nothing in the way of fruit half so good, and these are the finest looking home-baked apples I ever saw in my life.’ That, you know, was so very— And I am sure, by his manner, it was no compliment.”
At first you think Miss Bates is just making up for not having had a chance to say anything in the chapter on the Coles’ party, but pretty soon you realize she’s actually making up for not having had a chance to say anything in the entire history of literature from The Epic of Gilgameshup to the present moment.
There’s really no way to follow her, so Austen just closes down the chapter with her still talking. And we, too, will give her the last word—or the last four hundred thousand of them—and wait till next time to climb the stairs and see how Frank Churchill’s made out with those pesky spectacles.
And really, it’s okay. After Miss Bates in full flow, we could use a breather.