Robert Rodi's Blog, page 7

Emma, chapters 22-24

The current chapter of Emma leads with the following right hook:
Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
Ladies and gentlemen, Jane Austen is in the house!
Seriously, how anyone can read lines like that one—caustic, acerbic, radioactively unsentimental—and maintain an image of the woman who wrote them as a fluttery, breathy romantic is beyond me. This is a dame who eats romantics for breakfast. Scrambled. With a side of organ meats. Theirs.
And she’s in spectacular form going forward, as witness the passage that immediately follows, which hilariously smacks down the local chattering classes:
A week had not passed since Miss Hawkins’s name was first mentioned in Highbury, before she was, by some means or other, discovered to have every recommendation of person and mind,—to be handsome, elegant, highly accomplished, and perfectly amiable; and when Mr. Elton himself arrived to triumph in his happy prospects, and circulate the fame of her merits, there was very little more for him to do than to tell her Christian name, and say whose music she principally played.
Austen goes on to paint a devastating portrait of the gloating Mr. Elton, whose return to Highbury is sort of like that of Caesar’s to Rome after the conquest of Gaul. Only instead of dragging back tribal chieftains to publicly execute, Mr. Elton contents himself with publicly cutting dead both Emma and Harriet Smith—the first for jilting him, the second for daring to presume she was good enough for him. His weapon of choice is, of course, the reputation of his bride-to-be—of whom Austen tells us not much; just that aforementioned Christian name (Augusta), and that she “was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten”—dang, but she’s on a roll here. You may find yourself having to put the book down every few paragraphs and just catch your breath.
Emma, for her part, isn’t much affected by Mr. Elton throwing shade at her. She doesn’t care enough for his good opinion for it to matter a damn, and all he accomplishes is to give her “the impression of his not being improved by the mixture of pique and pretension now spread over his air.” The only pain he causes her is that he’s a reminder of her own gullibility. As for his much heralded fiancée, Emma’s so far from dreading that lady’s arrival that she actually can’t wait for her to get here—since “a Mrs. Eltonwould be an excuse for any change of intercourse; former intimacy might sink without remark. It would be almost beginning their life of civility again.”
As for Miss Hawkins as an individual, Emma “thought very little. She was good enough for Mr. Elton, no doubt; accomplished enough for Highbury—handsome enough—to look plain, probably, by Harriet’s side.”
Whatshe was, must be uncertain; but whoshe was, might be found out; and setting aside the 10,000l., it did not appear that she was at all Harriet’s superior. She brought no name, no blood, no alliance. Miss Hawkins was the youngest of the two daughters of a Bristol—merchant, of course, he must be called…Bristol was her home, the very heart of Bristol; for though the father and mother had died some years ago, an uncle remained—in the law line:—nothing more distinctly honourable was hazarded of him, than that he was in the law line; and with him the daughter had lived. Emma guessed him to be the drudge of some attorney, and too stupid to rise. And all the grandeur of the connection seemed dependent on the elder sister, who was very well married, to a gentleman in a great way, near Bristol, who kept two carriages! That was the wind-up of the history; that was the glory of Miss Hawkins.
We know that Emma’s superhuman snobbery will eventually rear up and bite her in the ass; but for the moment, she has our gracious permission to keep trash-talking in this vein all she likes. In fact, we insist.
Unfortunately, while Emma’s basically immune to Mr. Elton’s prancing around Highbury in celebration of himself, Harriet Smith is another story. Where Emma serenely repels his haughty looks, they pierce Harriet like the beam from a laser cannon. She is “one of those, who, having once begun, would always be in love.” Exacerbating the problem is that, while Emma, on her aircraft-carrier-sized estate, can sail through the average week without seeing Mr. Elton at all, rooming-house resident Harriet “was sure just to meet with him, or just to miss him, just to hear his voice, or see his shoulder, just to have something to preserve him in her fancy”—and how much do we love that single phrase, “or see his shoulder”?...A brilliant summation of Harriet’s character. She’s a fetishist, in the way erotically charged teenaged girls often are. You know the type…the kind who filches the cute boy’s used napkin from the lunch-room trash, and builds a little shrine to it, then spends dreamy afternoons writing his name over and over again in her very best cursive.
She’s also, unfortunately, the kind of girl who wallows in romantic victimhood, and she gets plenty of help by virtue of the fact that, for the rest of Highbury, Mr. Elton is still oh so very all that. Hell, at Mrs. Goddard’s, he’s basically the young Sinatra, and just strutting by the house he reduces everyone in it to bobbysoxers.
At about this time, Robert Martin's sister Elizabeth calls at Mrs. Goddard’s; and though Harriet isn’t in, she leaves a note for her, “written in the very style to touch,—a small mixture of reproach with a great deal of kindness”—so that Harriet’s thrown into a tailspin about that, too. At least, she is whenever Mr. Elton’s shoulder isn’t thrusting itself into view, at which time she’s naturally hurled into a tizzy over that. She’s basically a human weather-vane, being buffeted by two encroaching fronts.
Had it been allowable entertainment, had there been no pain to her friend, or reproach to herself, in the waverings of Harriet’s mind, Emma would have been amused by its variations. Sometimes Mr. Elton predominated, sometimes the Martins; and each was occasionally useful as a check to the other.
So we have this very funny situation of Emma calibrating Harriet like a finely tuned vehicle running at high speed. If she veers too far in one direction, Emma maneuvers the controls to get her back on course. And when she wanders too far in the opposite direction, a few taps get her back again.
Alas, this lovely, suspended state can’t last. The kindness of Elizabeth Martin demands kindness in kind; meaning, Harriet must return the visit. Emma’s caught in a catch-22 here: as a well-bred young lady, she can’t flout social protocol by encouraging Harriet not to go. On the other hand, as Harriet’s protector, she can’t just send her blithely back to the wolves who nearly devoured her once before.
Being Emma Woodhouse, she hits on the perfect middle ground: she herself will take Harriet to Abbey-Mill Farm in her carriage, and drop her at the front door—then return fifteen minutes later to fetch her back again. This way, Harriet won’t be seduced into a longer stay, and the revival of old intimacies that might come with it—because as we all know, even today, “My ride is here” is one of the few unarguable social imperatives; and Elizabeth Martin and her mother and sisters will be left with an understanding that their relationship with Harriet is “to be only a formal acquaintance.” It's as definitive as can be managed, under the circumstances, without Harriet actually spitting on their shoes.
[Emma] could think of nothing better; and though there was something in it which her own heart could not approve—something of ingratitude, merely glossed over—it must be done, or what would become of Harriet?
The day of the visit arrives, and it finds Harriet in another nervous state, because she’s just seen “a trunk, directed to The Rev. Philip Elton, White Hart, Bath” being loaded into the butcher’s cart, which of course upsets her because Tragedy. But by the time Emma’s hauled her to the grounds of Abbey-Hill Farm, Harriet’s gone and swung hard in the other direction, and is getting all dewy at so many fondly familiar sights, like the old stump with the axe in it and the dead ’coon on the tree limb, that Emma increases her determination not to leave her to her own devices for one nanosecond longer than the agreed-upon quarter-hour.
And in fact it’s, like, thirteen minutes and 57 seconds before Emma’s back out front, and if Regency carriages had car horns you know Emma would be repeatedly honking hers until Harriet came bolting out the door, waving goodbye with one hand and holding her bonnet on with the other. And a good thing too, for it turns out Emma’s timing was dead-on. Harriet reveals that the Martin women “had received her doubtingly, if not coolly; and nothing beyond the merest common-place had been talked”, until Mrs. Martin mentioned that she thought Harriet had grown a bit. And suddenly everyone remembered how they might tell for sure: a pencil mark on the wainscot where she’d been measured the previous summer. And the sight of that pencil mark opened the conversational—and emotional—floodgates.
Hehad done it. They all seemed to remember the day, the hour, the party, the occasion,—to feel the same consciousness, the same regrets,—to be ready to return to the same good understanding; and they were just growing again like themselves (Harriet, as Emma must suspect, as ready as the best of them to be cordial and happy), when the carriage re-appeared, and all was over.
We want to hate Emma here, and we do a little; but we can’t hate her entirely, because even though she’s the dastardly villainess in this affair, she’s far from rejoining in the success of her diabolical plan.
Fourteen minutes to be given to those with whom she had thankfully passed six weeks not six months ago! Emma could not but picture it all, and feel how justly they might resent, how naturally Harriet must suffer. It was a bad business. She would have given a great deal, or endured a great deal, to have had the Martins in a higher rank of life. They were so deserving, that a little higher should have been enough; but as it was, how could she have done otherwise?
As always when Emma’s moral bearings go a bit wobbly, she feels a sudden need to see Mrs. Weston—probably because Mrs. Weston has spent basically her whole life telling Emma she’s perfect. Which is almost always reassuring, you’ll have to agree. (My dogs performs the same function for me.) So Emma directs the coach to Randalls, but instead overtakes Mr. and Mrs. Weston in the road, where they stop her to deliver some epic news: Frank Churchill is to arrive the very next day.
At least, that’s what Mr. Weston says; but of course he’s been saying it, with the utmost confidence, every Tuesday since the Lower Paleolithic era. It’s not till his wife confirms the news, by standing on one leg and mewling like a cat, that Emma can take it as gospel.
It’s a good thing she’s seated in the carriage, because if she were on her feet Emma might be unable to resist breaking into the Snoopy dance. This news is exactly the thing to push the tired old Martins and snotty Mr. Elton waaaay off to the margins. Frank Churchill’s star power is sufficient to relegate everyone else in town to Best Supporting Nobody status. Mrs. Weston actually seems so unnerved at the prospect of finally meeting her stepson, that as they part she says, “Think of me to-morrow, my dear Emma, at about four o’clock,” which is the hour set for Frank’s glorious descent from heaven (or at least from Oxford).
And Emma means to comply. In fact, all the rest of that day and the morning of the next she's reminded to think of Mrs. Weston at the appointed time, whenever she passes one of Hartfield's nineteen gazillion clocks —“‘Tis twelve,—I shall not forget to think of you four hours hence”—which is pretty good evidence that the girl's got a lot of time on her hands, when she’s not busy reordering the planets and redrawing the laws of physics.
She’s just considering how long it might be before she herself has the privilege of meeting Frank Churchill, when she opens the parlor door and there’s Frank Churchill right there, like she's just conjured him out of a magic crystal or something. He’s arrived early, and his proud papa, unable to wait showing him off, is making the rounds with him—first stop being the inestimable Woodhouses.
Emma is only momentarily nonplused; it will take more than a handsome, charismatic, nearly legendary figure being thrust upon her by surprise, to derail her composure. The roof caving in might do it, or the whole house bursting suddenly into flame, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. She’s no sooner absorbed the astonishing fact of Frank’s presence than she’s about the businesses of appraising him (“he was a very good looking young man; height, air, address, all were unexceptionable”) and deciding that she's going to like him.
But we readers…we’re a bit warier. We read about Frank’s “well-bred ease of manner” and “readiness to talk,” his “spirit and liveliness”—and we’re all, uh-oh. Because we’ve been down this road before. We’ve spent enough time in Austenland by this point, to spot one of her archetypes when it surfaces, and Frank Churchill couldn’t be more recognizably The Cad if he had it tattooed across his brow. He’s Mr. Willoughby and Mr. Wickham all over again; and Henry Crawford, too, though of course Henry Crawford was a much subtler and more complex figure, as befitted Austen’s increased prowess when she created him. So, too, will Frank Churchill be; though he presents a clearer danger in this novel, than Henry Crawford did in his. In Mansfield Park, we just kept shouting at Henry, “Go on, then, ruin her, ruin Fanny Price already,” because for that particular heroine, any change, even degradation, would be a clear improvement; but Emma’s already about eighty-five percent perfect, and we want to see her score max out by the end of the novel, not get knocked back to single digits.
So we’re not at all satisfied by the pages that follow, in which Frank Churchill says exactly what everyone wants to hear him say, and spreads pleasure over the room like margarine over toast, and even makes a reference to “coming home” that makes the buttons on his father’s waistcoat just pop clean off. Emma has enough presence of mind to wonder why if he considers this his home, it’s taken him so long to get his bouncy little butt cheeks anywhere near the place; “but still if it were a falsehood, it was a pleasant one, and pleasantly handled. His manner had no air of study or exaggeration. He really did look and speak as if in a state of no common enjoyment.”
This is all very, very bad. In Austen, we’ve learned not to trust the easy charmers, the glib fawners, the dazzling wits. The only men worth trusting are the ones who speak plainly and spare no one’s feelings…and who aren’t comfortable in a room filled with social liars. Frank Churchill is very attractive; but he’s just so obviously poisonous. I sometimes wonder whether he, and his ilk, are Austen’s revenge on a whole class of gorgeous flatterers who chatted her up at assemblies and balls, made her laugh and blush and feel girlish, then dashed off at the first opportunity to dance with anybody else.
Frank is so practiced at his craft that he instantly determines how best to insinuate himself into Emma’s good graces. As mistress of Highbury, she gets nothing but praise from everyone within a fifteen-mile radius, so it won’t make any impression if he goes that route and compliments her directly; instead he wins her over by fawning excessively over the unparalleled super-duperness of his stepmother. Emma, again, isn’t entirely a fool—“He did not advance a word of praise beyond what she knew to be thoroughly deserved by Mrs. Weston; but, undoubtedly, he could know very little of the matter”—having known the lady for, at this point, all of eleven minutes.
He got as near as he could to thanking [Emma] for Miss Taylor’s merits, without seeming quite to forget that, in the common course of things, it was rather to be supposed that Miss Taylor had formed Miss Woodhouse’s character, than Miss Woodhouse Miss Taylor’s.
And yet Emma laps it all up like a dish of cream. Possibly because it can’t do any harm to allow him to cover her in so much insincere gush, since it’s kindly meant; and also, it is pretty pleasant to hear. And she’s already made her mind up to like him—made it up long before she ever met him, in fact. Without some really serious defect, why should she sour on him now? She’s got a fair amount invested in the guy. 
Which makes her consider whether he might feel similarly about her.
Emma wondered whether the same suspicion of what might be expected from their knowing each other, which had taken strong possession of her mind, had ever crossed his; and whether his compliments were to be considered as marks of acquiescence, or proofs of defiance.
She can’t help catching Mr. Weston twinkling at them from the corner of his eye, obviously happily nursing those same expectations. Mr. Woodhouse, however, is completely oblivious to any such undercurrents; “it seemed as if he could not think so ill of any two persons’ understanding as to suppose they meant to marry until it were proved against them.” (Wonderful line!) He’s much more focused on learning whether young Frank caught a cold on his journey from Oxford, or was bitten by any poisonous adders, or perhaps lost the use of any limbs.
Ultimately Mr. Weston rises to take his leave, with the excuse that he has business in town. And then, because Austen is the kind of ruthlessly economical novelist who never wastes a word, our antennae go up, because Frank says:
“As you are going farther on business, sir, I will take the opportunity of paying a visit, which must be paid some day or other, and therefore may as well be paid now. I have the honour of being acquainted with a neighbor of yours (turning to Emma), a lady residing in or near Highbury; a family of the name of Fairfax. I shall have no difficulty, I suppose, in finding the house; though Fairfax, I believe, is not the proper name,—I should rather say Barnes or Bates. Do you know any family of that name?”
Emma now recalls that Jane Fairfax had met Frank at Weymouth, and says of course yes, she knows the family in question, and encourages Frank to pay the call. And he gripes and moans so much about how there’s no hurry, he can go any time, but he might as well do it now and get it out of the way, before his days start filling up with interesting things he’d rather be doing than to go and pay a visit to someone he barely knows at all…and Emma just smiles and buys every syllable. (Well, to be fair…the first time I read the novel, so did I. I was younger, then, and much more trusting.)
But she isn’t willing to let him go without at least taking a stab at getting some good dish on Jane. “I have heard her speak of the acquaintance,” Emma says; “she is a very elegant woman.”
[Frank] agreed to it, but with so quiet a “Yes,” as inclined her almost to doubt his real concurrence; and yet there must be a very distinct sort of elegance for the fashionable world, if Jane Fairfax could be thought only ordinarily gifted.
This is one of the only glimmers we get of anything approaching social anxiety in Emma. We’re reminded that for all her supreme self-confidence, she’s still very young, and has lived almost entirely in the country, so that her exposure to “the fashionable world” has been pretty much nil. The idea that such a world would be dismissive of a Jane Fairfax, causes her a tremor of self-doubt. We like her for it, even though we know she’d conquer any fashionable society she entered. Regency London, Gilded Age Washington, beatnik Manhattan…just give up and make her queen already.
Emma warns Frank that Jane Fairfax has an aunt who never stops talking—no, really, she never. Stops. Talking—and sends him off to pay the call. But she hardly has time to reflect on this first meeting, because he boomerangs back again the next morning, this time in the company of his stepmother. Emma is gratified to see her old governess looking so pleased—though of course Frank is the kind of silver-tongued devil who could reduce any woman to putty in his hands. Give him ten minutes with Hillary Clinton and she’d be blushing and giggling like an Olsen twin.
Emma joins them on a tour of Highbury, and Frank further raises himself in her esteem by the intensity of his interest in the town. “He begged to be shown the house which his father had lived in so long…and on recollecting that an old woman, who had nursed him, was still living, walked in quest of her cottage”—and so on, to the point that Emma is convinced he really can’t have stayed away for so long voluntarily; and if Mr. Knightley could only see him now, he’d be compelled to think so, too.
When they reach the Crown Inn, Frank is struck by its ballroom, which he is shocked—shocked, I tell you—to learn is no longer used for balls, the local population being too small for the endeavor. Frank is certain—certain, I tell you—that this impediment can easily be overcome, and that Emma of all people ought to know as much.
Why had not Miss Woodhouse revived the former good old days of the room? She who could do any thing in Highbury! The want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be tempted to attend, were mentioned; but he was not satisfied.
Emma’s a little put off by his certainty that he could fill the place easily enough, just by reaching out his arm and scooping in anyone sufficiently ambulatory to cut a few capers on the dance floor; “his indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge, however, of the evil he was holding cheap. It was but an effusion of lively spirits.” Clearly, Frank is not the sort of person who’d look down his nose at the Martins of Abbey-Hill Farm, and might even partner one of the girls in the funky chicken, given the chance. We like him for this; I’m betting Austen does too. He’s not quite as thoroughly cretinous as Willoughby or Wickham; his creator is allowing him some layers. Just not quite as many as Henry Crawford—the weight of which capsized her last enterprise.
Conversation eventually turns to the visit to the Bates household, and Frank thanks Emma for having forewarned him about Miss Bates’s mutant ability to speak for six-and-a-half weeks before needing to take a breath; despite which Frank found himself held captive for so long he basically needed a shave by the time he got away.
When Emma asks how he found Jane Fairfax, he says “very will” and makes a remark about her “deplorable want of complexion”, which is so startlingly harsh that it prompts Emma—of all people—to come to Jane’s defense, arguing that her delicate paleness is in keeping with her overall elegance. But Frank stands firm in his judgment.
“Well,” said Emma, “there is no disputing about taste. At least you admire her, except her complexion.”
He shook his head and laughed. “I cannot separate Miss Fairfax and her complexion.”
But despite his willingness to disparage Jane’s looks, Emma can’t tempt him into any gossip about her activities at Weymouth, or her relationships with each of the Campbells, or even how well Frank knew her there. “It is always the lady’s right to decide on the degree of acquaintance,” he insists; “Miss Fairfax must already have given her account. I shall not commit myself by claiming more than she may choose to allow.”
Which prompts Emma to retort, “Upon my word, you answer as discreetly as she could do herself.” Despite which, she doesn’t find discretion in Frank Churchill quite as disgusting she does in Jane Fairfax. Possibly because Frank’s charisma is so high-voltage that it pretty much blinds Emma to everything else—as when she begins to talk pityingly about the sad destiny awaiting Jane, as a mere governess; which prompts Mrs. Weston, a former governess, to clear her throat and say, “Um, hello, standing right here.”
So no, Frank Churchill’s influence on Emma is not a good one. Not even a leeetle bit. But dang if it don’t feelgood to Emma herself. She’s practically purring in his company.
Even so, Jane Fairfax seems to hover between them, like an invisible third wheel. Neither seems able—or willing—to leave her behind. Frank now asks whether Emma has ever heard her play. Emma has (“I have heard her every year of our lives since we both began” being the rather groaning way she phrases it), and commends her skill. Frank is glad to hear it, because he’s no judge of music himself. But he assumed Jane’s skill must be pretty rad, based on the opinion of another man, who once gave Jane musical pride of place over his own intended wife.
Emma realizes instantly that Frank must mean Mr. Dixon, and she pounces on this mini-scandal like a leopard on a wounded fawn. She wonders aloud about Mr. Dixon’s fiancée’s reaction to this obvious slight; “I could not excuse a man’s having more music than love—more ear than eye—a more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings. How did Miss Campbell appear to like it?”
Apparently Miss Campbell didn’t mind at all, because she, like every other inhabitant of planet Earth except, it seems, to two people now obsessing over her, just adores Jane Fairfax to itty-bitty pieces. Well, what about Jane herself, then, Emma wants to know? “She must have felt the improper and dangerous distinction.” And when Frank hems and haws, she realizes she’s given him an impossible question to answer.
“Oh, do not imagine that I expect an account of Miss Fairfax’s sensations from you, or from any body else. They are known to no human being, I guess, but herself; but if she continued to play whenever she was asked by Mr. Dixon, one may guess what one chooses.”
Frank allows that Emma’s guesses on that score must be better than his own, because she’s known Jane longer; but Emma protests that time in this case means nothing. She doesn’t know Jane at all, she never has. Everyone always expected them to be intimate friends, but this has never happened, because “I never could attach myself to any one so completely reserved.”
“It is a most repulsive quality, indeed,” said he. “Oftentimes very convenient, no doubt, but never pleasing. There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.”
It’s only on repeated readings of Emmathat we find ourselves wondering what the hell’s going on in Frank’s mind when he says things like this. It’s a sign of Austen’s expanded powers that we see him as a human being whose motivations interest us, in a way Wickham and Willoughby never did—they were painted with broad strokes; their actions spoke for themselves. But…Frank Churchill, man. What’s he feeling right at this moment? Triumph, at so completely suckering Emma? Regret, at feeling the necessity of doing so? A kind of sexual exhilaration in his ability to so easily manipulate women? What?
As for our homegirl, her thoughts are much more obvious.
Emma felt herself so well acquainted with him, that she could hardly believe it to be only their second meeting. He was not exactly what she had expected; less of the man of the world in some of his notions, less of the spoiled child of fortune, therefore better than she had expected. His ideas seemed more moderate—his feelings warmer.
She’s also convinced, from other inferences, that he has “a very amiable inclination to settle early in life, and to marry, from worthy motives…no doubt he did perfectly feel that Enscombe could not make him happy, and that whenever he were attached, he would willingly give up much of wealth to be allowed an early establishment.”
Emma’s already demonstrated that totally misreading characters is her mutant superpower; the irony is that, in this last reflection, she really isn’t so wide of the mark. But it will be a long time before she learns this, and it won’t make her a bit happy when she does.
Still, by that time, she’ll have plenty of other things to worry about.

Emma, chapters 19-21

The second volume of the triple-decker that is Emmaopens with its heroine out walking with Harriet Smith. This isn’t very remarkable; we’ve already learned that Harriet’s principal value to Emma is that of someone to walk with, and to talk with while walking with. But that’s not working out so well this morning, because Harriet is disappointed in love, and has, “in Emma’s opinion, been talking enough of Mr. Elton that day.” Yet however much Emma tries to change the subject, it happens to “burst out again when she thought she had succeeded,” because, like many a teenage girl before and after her, Harriet can turn any subject ‘round to the guy that got away. The price of salt cod?...The Russo-Persian war?...The Yazoo land scandal?...Harriet will find Mr. Elton in there somewhere.
When the two young women find themselves in the neighborhood where Mrs. and Miss Bates reside, Emma decides “to call upon them and seek safety in numbers.” She can also kill two birds with one stone, because her neglect of the Bates ladies is seen as a defect by those “very few who presumed ever to see imperfection in her” (why not just come out and say the Knightley brothers?), so she can make a show of being better than their opinion of her, while at the same time putting the kibosh of Harriet’s annoying Eltonmania.
This is a desperate tack for Emma, because she really doesn’t like visiting the Bateses. And I mean really really doesn’t like it. To her it’s “very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them.” Even worse, if they’ve had a letter from their niece—the dreaded Jane Fairfax—Emma will be stuck there for the better part of a geologic age as the letter is read and re-read and analyzed and deconstructed and translated into Latin and copied onto lengths of ribbon and tied to the feet of doves who are then sent flying off to paradise. But Emma, calculating from the date of the last such letter, figures she’s safe from any new one today.
And so she and Harriet bop up to the humble little apartment above the street, and we finally, at this late stage of the novel, get our first full, unadulterated dose of Mrs. and Miss Bates. Actually, just the latter; the former is basically a nullity—she’s ancient and she knits, is about the sum total of her character. But Miss Bates!...Sweet lawd jebus save us. One of Austen’s titanically great creations. She introduces her as the elder lady’s “more active, talking daughter,” which is sort of like Shakespeare introducing Richard III as a “busy, thinking prince.” The fact is, Miss Bates is the greatest of all Austen’s epic talkers; she is unstoppably garrulous. Her volubility is a kind of existential phenomenon: she talks and talks and talks, with enormous energy and breathtaking velocity, and says absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, niente. Each word is like a grain of sand in a vast desert of utter triviality. She is relentless; she is superhuman; she is mercilessly, cruelly, immortally funny.
Here she is, for instance, on the subject of Jane Fairfax’s latest letter (because of course Emma got her calculations wrong, and there has been a new piece of correspondence from Emma’s very bestest-ever frenemy). At first Miss Bates can’t locate the missive and Emma thinks maybe she’s safe, but no, it turns up:
“Oh, here it is. I was sure it could not be far off; but I had put my huswife upon it, you see, without being aware, and so it was quite hid, but I had it in my hand so very lately that I was almost sure it must be on the table. I was reading it to Mrs. Cole, and, since she went away, I was reading it again to my mother, for it is such a pleasure to her—a letter from Jane—that she can never hear it often enough; so I knew it could not be far off, and here it is, only just under my huswife,—and since you are so kind as to wish to hear what she says; but, first of all, I must really, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter, only two pages you see, hardly two, and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says, when the letter is first opened, ‘Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that checker-work’—don’t you, ma’am? And then I tell her, I am sure she would contrive to make it out herself, if she had nobody to do it for her, every word of it,—I am sure she would pore over it till she had made out every word. And, indeed, though my mother’s eyes are not so good as they were, she can see amazingly well still, thank God! with the help of spectacles. It is such a blessing! My mother’s are really very good indeed. Jane often says, when she is here, ‘I am sure, grandmamma, you must have had very strong eyes to see as you do—and so much fine work as you have done too!—I only wish my eyes may last me as well.’”
This is just the warm-up to the letter, keep in mind. She hasn’t even read the first freakin’ line yet. You begin to feel Emma’s will to live sap slowly, inexorably away.
The substance of the letter’s not-quite-two-pages, which require Miss Bates nearly double that to summarize, is that Jane Fairfax, absent from Highbury for two years, is coming back for a visit. The family with whom she’s been living, the Campbells, are going to Ireland to see their newly married daughter, whose husband has a grand county-seat there.
“…(It is) a beautiful place, I fancy. Jane has heard a great deal of its beauty,—from Mr. Dixon, I mean,—I do not know that she ever heard about it from any body else,—but it was very natural, you know, that he should like to speak of his own place while he was paying his addresses,—and as Jane used to be very often walking out with them,—for Colonel and Mrs. Campbell were very particular about their daughter’s not walking out often with only Mr. Dixon, for which I do not at all blame them: of course she heard every thing he might be telling Miss Campbell about his home in Ireland…He is a most amiable, charming young man, I believe. Jane was quite longing to go to Ireland, from his account of things.”
And yet, Jane is not going to Ireland, to visit this charming Mr. Dixon and his wife, who was her childhood friend; but is instead coming back to Highbury to stay with her aunt and grandmother, where the odds of having anything like a pleasant time aren’t so much unlikely as statistically nonexistent. This prompts “an ingenious and animating suspicion” in Emma’s brain, and she slyly asks for more details—and learns that the Campbells themselves are quite mad for Jane to come, in fact they’re at the point of roping and tying her and dragging her along behind them like a rodeo steer.
Yet Jane steadfastly refuses—and this despite owing Mr. Dixon her life. For it seems that during a certain yachting party, the sails were whipping around in a manner that at one point would have “dashed (Jane) into the sea” but for Mr. Dixon stepping in and manfully taking hold of her. “I can never think of it without trembling!” Miss Bates says, adding that ever since “I have been so fond of Mr. Dixon!”
And probably not just you, Emma thinks—a supposition made stronger when she recalls that the Campbell’s daughter “has no remarkable degree of personal beauty,—is not by any means to be compared with Miss Fairfax.” Suddenly Emma’s not so totally unwilling to hear more of her hostess’s inane prattle. In fact, were Miss Bates to clam up now, Emma might very well flip her onto the carpet and press her knee in her back until she agreed to say more.
No worries, of course, because the only inducement Miss Bates needs to talk is an atmosphere of sufficient density to carry sound waves. She gladly relays how Jane has pleaded illness to avoid the Irish trip, and the Campbells have been forced to agree that a return to the air of her native county might benefit her. This propels Miss Bates into such an extended fit of declamation (“You may guess, dear Miss Woodhouse, what a flurry it has thrown me in! If it was not from the drawback of her illness—but I am afraid we must expect to see her grown thin, and looking very poorly. I must tell you what an unlucky thing happened to me as to that...” etc.) that by the time she’s recovered herself, and is ready to—y’know—actually read the goddamn letter—Emma regrets that she’s stayed past her allotted time, and must go.
And not all that could be urged to detain her succeeded. She regained the street, happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had, in fact, heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself.
Probably Miss Bates’s voice is still ringing in her ears twenty minutes after she leaves. I know it’s still ringing in mine.
Austen now presses pause, and shuttles back to cover Jane Fairfax’s back story—though being sophisticated readers, we’ve already inferred most of it. But the novel was a new form back when Emmawas first published, so Austen presumably felt obliged to fill in all the blanks, cross all the T’s, and spackle in all the cracks.
Jane, we learn, is the poor orphaned child of Mrs. Bates’s youngest daughter, about whom nothing is said; but we can presume that as the younger sister of Miss Bates she grew to womanhood without ever getting a word in edgewise. This lady’s husband, one Lieutenant Fairfax, died in action abroad, triggering his wife’s subsequent death from grief—so right away we’re off to a swell start—and toddler Jane fell into the lap of her aunt and grandmother.
There she might have languished forever, were it not for a certain Col. Campbell, who owed his life to Jane’s father and chose to repay the debt by taking on Jane’s expenses…and then eventually taking on Jane herself, as a companion for his dog-faced daughter, since the two girls had become fast friends over the course of many visits. And “from that period Jane had belonged to Col. Campbell’s family, and had lived with them entirely, only visiting her grandmother from time to time.”
The Campbells were very fond of Jane and gave her an excellent education, with the idea that eventually—when their own daughter was married and established in her own home—that Jane should make a living educating others, as a teacher or governess, those being the only honorable professions open to a young lady of Jane’s qualities at the time (the Hooters franchise not having yet been established). But when the time came, and Miss Campbell “became Mrs. Dixon and was carried off to Ireland,” the Campbells found that Jane “was too much beloved to be parted with”—so that the day of her finally beginning her destined career has been continually postponed, with a stream of excuses such as Oh, she’s still too young, or Oh, she’s not really in the best of health, or Oh, it might rain today, or Oh, it’s time for lunch.
Eventually Jane herself girds her loins and sets her twenty-first year as the time for her “to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.” Which is a rather fine whine about what will essentially be looking after a few pampered brats in their parents’ undoubtedly comfortable home. It’s not like Jane’s going to be forced to do forty hours a week of data entry in a cubicle, or anything.
Austen makes much of the fact that everyone in the Campbell clan—father, mother, hatchet-faced daughter—is just crazy about Jane, which is “the more honourable to each party from the circumstance of Jane’s decided superiority both in beauty and acquirements. That nature had given it in feature could not be unseen by the young woman, nor could her higher powers of mind be unfelt by the parents.” Apparently, Jane’s just one of those people you ought to hate but can’t; she seems to win over everyone who comes within twenty yards of her, like she excretes ambrosial pheremones or something…everyone, that is, except Emma.
Which is what has brought up the interesting possibility—immediately seized on by Emma’s suspicious mind (she’s a bit of a “busy, thinking” sort herself)—that there’s more to Jane’s return to Highbury than meets the eye. To be sure, her claim of ill health is no lie, since she “had never been quite well since the time of (the Campbells’) daughter’s marriage” and suffers from “a weakened frame and varying spirits” (pointless aside: Varying Spirits will be my next band name). But Austen even admits to a measure of skullduggery. “With regard to (Jane) not accompanying them to Ireland, her account to her aunt contained nothing but the truth, though there might be some truths not told.” Oh reaaaally? And again, because we’re sophisticated readers, we suspect (along with Emma) that the unavoidable comparisons between Miss Fairfax and Miss Campbell can’t have escaped Mr. Dixon’s notice on those innumerable walks they all took together. In fact, you have to wonder what private moments might have passed between Jane and Mr. Dixon on those walks, when Miss Campbell was momentarily distracted by, say, chasing a squirrel up a tree. Could Jane’s return to Highbury actually be a kind of flight? And from what? Disappointment?...Guilt?...Temptation?...A memory of sweet monkey mojo in the moonlight?
Despite these tantalizing conjectures, which you might expect would provide quite a meal for someone as deviously inclined as Emma, she doesn’t look forward to the opportunity of actually examining the Jane herself for first-hand evidence of emotional turmoil. Quite the opposite.
Emma was sorry to have to pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long months!—to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought. Why she did not like Jane Fairfax might be a difficult question to answer…”she could never get acquainted with her: she did not know how it was, but there was such coldness and reserve—such apparent indifference whether she pleased or not…and she was made such a fuss with by every body!—and it had been always imagined that they were to be so intimate—because their ages were the same, every body had supposed they must be so fond of each other.” These were her reasons; she had no better.
Well, give the girl a break…that’s plenty.
It should be pretty clear by now that I’m no Fairfax fan myself. In her, I see the resurrection of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price—clawing her way into this novel, like a zombie from its grave, to come staggering around where she’s not wanted, frightening the cats and setting the dogs to barking. I like to think that Austen, having got Fanny Price-worship out of her system—presumably askin to going cold turkey off heroin—can now look back and see what a mistake she made; and is giving us Jane Fairfax as a kind of corrective, almost an apology: “See here? I get it now; I understand that a dainty little cipher who binds herself up in propriety can be a relentless, stabbing pain in the ass.”
And yet, like most addicts in recovery, she hasn’t quite shaken off the old demons entirely; and the wavering of resolve she feels, are passed right along to Emma, whose dislike of Jane Fairfax is “so little just,—every imputed fault was so magnified by fancy,—that she never saw Jane Fairfax, the first time after any considerable absence, without feeling that she injured her”. And in fact, when the two girls do meet again, Emma is knocked out by “the very appearance and manners, which for those two whole years she had been depreciating. Jane Fairfax was very elegant, remarkably elegant; and she had herself the highest value for elegance.”
When she took in her history, indeed, her situation, as well as her beauty; when she considered what all this elegance was destined to, what she was going to sink from, how she was going to live, it seemed impossible to feel any thing but compassion and respect; especially, if to every well-known particular, entitling her to interest, were added the highly probably circumstance of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, which she had so naturally started herself.
Yes, especially that; and now that it comes to it, Emma can’t even muster the energy to dwell on the more lurid possibilities of that unfortunate attraction. She “was very willing now to acquit her of having seduced Mr. Dixon’s affections from his wife, or of any thing mischievous which her imagination had suggested at first. If it were love, it might be simple, single, successless love on her side alone.”
So Emma’s determined to give Jane another chance, and really try to like her this time—like a precocious adolescent who’s ready to have another go at brussels sprouts. She’s so far gone in “softened, charitable feelings, as made her look around in walking home, and lament that Highbury afforded no man worthy of giving (Jane) independence,—nobody that she could wish to scheme about for her.” Yes, Emma really is one of those people who will just keep on touching the scalding-hot stove until her blistered, wounded hand just falls right off.
But then she spends ten minutes actually talkingto Jane and everything snaps right back to its default setting. At an evening engagement at Hartfield, Jane is “so cold, so cautious! There was no getting at her real opinion. Wrapt up in a cloak of politeness, she seemed determined to hazard nothing. She was disgustingly, was suspiciously reserved.” Emma fishes like crazy for some hint at the truth about Jane’s history with Mr. Dixon, and comes up empty every time. And “the like reserve prevailed on other topics.”
(Jane) and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were a little acquainted; but not a syllable of real information could Emma procure as to what he truly was. “Was he handsome?”—“She believed he was reckoned a fine young man.”—“Was he aggreable?”—“He was generally thought so.”—“Did he appear a sensible young man; a young man of information?”—“At a watering-place, or in a common London acquaintance, it was difficult to decide on such points…She believed every body found his manners pleasing.” Emma could not forgive her.
It’s a lovely irony Austen offers up here: in a single family, we have an aunt who’s a virtual avatar of logorrhea, and a niece who can barely be made to cough up a half-dozen syllables. She’s on form here, our J.A.—very much on form.
Emma’s low opinion of Jane Fairfax is not shared by Mr. Knightley (hell—it’s not shared by anybody), and that gentleman has a history of riding Emma’s backside without a saddle where her treatment of Jane is concerned. So he’s tickled pink by the sight of Emma and Jane paired off on a settee, their heads together in private talk; he’s unaware that Emma is furiously trying to get Jane to commit to just…one…thing. (“What’s your favorite cheese?” “I must own, I enjoy them all.” “Which do you like better, Christmas or Easter?” “In the winter I generally prefer the former; in the spring, the latter.” “Shall I poke you in the eye, or pull your forefinger all the way back?” “Whichever you prefer; for myself, am indifferent.”)
The next day Mr. Knightley openly commends Emma for the improvement in her manners towards Jane. Emma replies, a bit frostily, “I am happy you approved…but I hope I am not often deficient in what is due to guests at Hartfield.”
And then, once again, we’re transported into the ring, with Knightley in one corner, Emma in the other, their gloves shielding their faces, and circling, circling. Emma gets in the first jab, right at Knightley’s kisser, when she sniffs that “Miss Fairfax is reserved”, but he easily dances away from it, then prances back smiling.
“My dear Emma…you are not going to tell me, I hope, that you had not a pleasant evening.”
“Oh, no; I was pleased with my own perseverance in asking questions, and amused to think how little information I obtained.”
It’s a good start, and we’re hoping for another epic bout between them, like their knock-down-drag-out over Frank Churchill; but unfortunately Mr. Woodhouse is present, and being utterly clueless to the crackling sexual dynamic between his daughter and her dreamy-eyed antagonist, he chooses this moment to go off on an extended monologue about whether he ought to send a leg of pork to the Bateses, because what if they salt it too heavily. When he hears that Emma has already sent them a whole hind-quarter, he launches right into a dizzy dissertation on which is the less risky for oversalting, and through the whole thing you can pretty much picture Emma and Mr. Knightley staring at him in increasing despair and thinking Please sweet lord God in heaven not one more word about salt pork.
And when he’s finally finished, Mr. Knightley’s like, Thank God (maybe he runs his hand over his jaw, to check whether, after all that, he might need a shave). Then he turns back to Emma—their tiff over Jane Fairfax now forgotten (salted over, you might say)—and slyly says, “Emma…I have a piece of news for you.” And he teases her with it, while she hops up and down to hear it, like a macaw being offered something shiny.
But Mr. Knightley draws out the suspense too long, because who should burst in to spoil everything—not only the surprise, but the longed-for respite from salt pork—but Miss Bates, with Jane Fairfax blowing in behind her like a tumbleweed. “Full of thanks and full of news, (she) knew not which to give quickest” and so she decides to just handle both at once, by mashing them into together in one epic blurt. “My dear Miss Woodhouse—I come quite overpowered. Such a beautiful hind-quarter of pork! You are too bountiful! Have you heard the news? Mr. Elton is going to be married.”
Mr. Knightley admits to Emma that this was the story with which he’d been tantalizing her; and Miss Bates is surprised he's already heard, and asks how he came to hear of it. Which in an ordinary human being born of a mother's womb and not a hellspawn spat up from the devil’s lower intestine, would involve saying, “Mr. Knightley, how came you to hear of it?” But with Miss Bates it goes like this:
“But where could you hear it?” cried Miss Bates. “Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole’s note—no, it cannot be more than five—or at least ten—for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about the park—Jane was standing in the passage—were you not, Jane?—for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said, I would go down and see, and Jane said, ‘Shall I go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen.’—‘Oh, my dear,’ said I—well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins—that’s all I know—a Miss Hawkins of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly have heard of it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins—”
At which point Mr. Knightley is compelled to interrupt her. Possibly with a blunt instrument.
Really, I just love Miss Bates. She’s phenomenal. Ask her how to get from her parlor to her sitting room, and she’ll give you directions longer than you’d get for a trip from Istanbul to Riyadh.
Now that the news is out, it’s to be thrashed over like a meaty bone among a pack of hyenas—all except for Jane Fairfax, of course, who holds herself aloof from the general feeding frenzy. Miss Bates, engaging in what an analyst might call “projection,” says to her:
“…Jane, you have never seen Mr. Eton:—no wonder that you have such a curiosity to see him.”
Jane’s curiosity did not appear of the absorbing nature as wholly to occupy her.
This is very funny stuff, especially since it helps further fix Jane’s character. By now, we’re pretty sure that if she were tied to some train tracks with a locomotive bearing down on her, her efforts to wriggle free would not be of such an absorbing nature as wholly to occupy her.
Most of the ensuing discussion is taken up, as you might expect, by Miss Bates’s saga-length discursions, but whenever anyone else can get his or her two cents in, it’s all in aid of wondering what kind of lady this Miss Hawkins must be, to land such a catch as Mr. Elton, who—Emma explains to Jane—is considered “the standard of perfection in Highbury, both in person and in mind.” Yes, she really says this; she's that shameless.
Eventually the subject peters out—because of course no one knows a goddamn thing about Miss Hawkins, and there’s only so long you can dance around a subject you’re completely ignorant of, even with Miss Bates and her apocalyptic mouth factored in—and everyone takes his or her leave. Miss Bates’s parting words are notable, in that they comprise more sheer verbiage than Jane Fairfax has managed during the entirety of the chapter, and managed to touch on every single one of its principal themes, whether or not they're in context or even coherent.
“…This has been a most agreeable piece of news indeed. I shall just go round by Mrs. Cole’s; but I shall not stop three minutes: and Jane, you had better go home directly—I would not have you out in a shower! We think she is better for Highbury already. Thank you, we do indeed. I shall not attempt calling on Mrs. Goddard, for I really do not think she cares for any thing but boiled pork; when we dress the leg it will be another thing. Good morning to you, my dear sir. Oh, Mr. Knightley is coming too. Well, that is so very!—I am sure if Jane is tired, you will be so kind as to give her your arm. Mr. Elton, and Miss Hawkins. Good morning to you.”
Good morning? Surely it’s good afternoon, by now. Possibly even good evening. Or, hell, Merry Christmas.
But, oh. Just wait. Because it ain't over.
We’ve seen this phenomenon before, in previous Austen novels: some epic talker will browbeat us into submission for six or seven pages—and another character will take it as a kind of thrown gauntlet, and come roaring back to top the performance with one exponentially more logorrheic. In this case it’s Harriet Smith, of all people—who’s up to now been more of a natterer, emitting a low but steady stream of nothing much more than oh goodness me’s and heavens and dear me whatever nexts and really Miss Woodhouses do you think so’s.
But now…well, just push back the furniture to make room for her. 
Emma, feeling that Harriet must hear the news of Mr. Elton’s upcoming nuptials from her, before the rest of Highbury gets the news, is just waiting out the rain before venturing forth to Mrs. Goddard’s. But before she can get out the door Harriet herself bursts obligingly in, “with just the heated, agitated look which hurrying thither with a full heart was likely to give,” and Emma’s like, Oops, too late.
But in fact Harriet has come about something else entirely, which she relates at such tremendous length, and utilizing such a quantity!—really such an astonishing number!—of exclamation points! Why, you’d think her in danger of exhausting the available planetary supply and leaving future generations none to use in their own extremities of astonishment or incredulity! Really, none at all!
The upshot is, Harriet, having been caught in the cloudburst, sought to escape it by ducking into the haberdasher’s shop, and who else should be there but “Elizabeth Martin and her brother! Dear Miss Woodhouse! only think. I thought I should have fainted.” There’s a lot of I-looked-at-her-but-then-she-looked-away and vice-versa and rinse and repeat, and a lot of very specific Not Talking and Moving Casually about, until at length Robert Martin finally twigs to Harriet’s presence. Hushed words with his sister follow.
“…I could not help thinking that he was persuading her to speak to me—(do you think he was, Miss Woodhouse?)—for presently she came forward—came quite up to me, and asked me how I did, and seemed ready to shake hands, if I would. She did not do any of it in the same way that she used; I could see that she was altered; but however, she seemed to tryto be very friendly, and we shook hands, and stood talking some time; but I know no more what I said—I was in such a tremble! I remember she said she was sorry we never met now; which I thought almost too kind!”
Eventually Robert Martin himself stepped forward and offered her a few courteous words on an alternate route to Hartfield, where she might avoid puddles. Oh, that sweet-talker. It sure seems to have worked on Harriet, who was of course ready to faint every three-point-five seconds, and trembling and quaking and shivering so that it was a miracle she didn’t vibrate all the nails right out of the floorboards.
Harriet of course now begs for Emma’s advice on what to do, because that’s worked out so well for her this far. Emma herself, amazingly, isn’t ready with the mot juste. She finds she’s actually “obliged to stop and think.” But for Emma, stopping and thinking really means, stopping and finding justification for the prejudices she’s already latched onto. It’s interesting to watch this process unfold.
The young man’s conduct, and his sister’s, seemed the result of real feeling, and she could not but pity them. As Harriet described it, there had been an interesting mixture of wounded affection and genuine delicacy in their behaviour: but she had believed them to be well-meaning, worthy people, before; and what difference did this make in the evils of the connection? It was folly to be disturbed by it. Of course, he must be sorry to lose her,—they must all be sorry; ambition, as well as love, had probably been mortified. They might all have hoped to rise by Harriet’s acquaintance; and besides, what was the value of Harriet’s description? So easily pleased,—so little discerning,—what signified her praise?
These are the moments we find it hardest to like Emma. And when she follows through with her advice to Harriet (“It might be distressing for the moment…but you seem to have behaved extremely well; and it is over,—and may never,—can never, as a first meeting,—occur again, and therefore you need not think about it”) we really do want to pull her hair, or flick her ear or something.
Emma’s actually grateful to be able now to distract Harriet with the news of Mr. Elton; and Harriet—like a baby in a crib, fascinated by whatever bright new object her mobile wafts her way—is soon entirely absorbed by that subject, and awash in the various feelings and speculations and exclamation points it provokes.
As we leave Emma, she’s feeling pretty dang satisfied at having regained her control over Harriet, and at having secured her from those grasping, ambitious, social-climbing Martins. Poor Emma. She’s a would-be Machiavelli, but she keeps mistaking every skirmish for the whole campaign. 
Next time, a new face joins the fray—that of the long anticipated, and many times heralded, Mr. Frank Churchill—but he doesn’t come as an ally. Though Emma won’t know that immediately. Nor, of course, do we want her to. We’re vicious that way. But then…so is Emma’s creator. God bless her caustic, calculating heart.

Emma, chapters 16-18

The new chapter leads off with one of my favorite Austen’s sentences: “The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.” Because God forbid you should be miserable with your hair drooping. Priorities, please.
Also, allow me to note—as I haven’t in a while—the utter nonentity that is that maid. Very, very few of the serving-class characters in Austen’s novels are ever named, even fewer given any lines, and virtually none allowed anything like a distinct character. I’ve been in correspondence with a reader who’s pointed out that in Austen’s time, and in Austen’s particular class stratum—the impoverished gentry—there was almost nothing analogous to what we call privacy or personal space, and that masters and servants lived virtually on top of each other. And so, lacking physical space to define the division between them, the gentry set up a kind of perceptual smokescreen. The servants might be in the room, they might be leaning right over them serving dinner, they might have their goddamn fingers in their hair, putting it in curl so they could be nice and miserable…but for all practical purposes, they were invisible to them. Ils n’existent pas.
I can certainly understand and accept this; but it’s also the kind of social limitation a writer of genius ought to overcome. It’s hard to believe that Austen—who numbers among the nimblest, most quicksilver minds we encounter in all of English literature (hell, world literature)—had no curiosity about the lives that ran parallel to hers—in the very same freakin’ rooms, for God’s sake. Certainly Shakespeare and Dickens didn’t shy away from delving into lower-class characters.
I love Austen, and I rank her in the same pantheon as those gentlemen; and this may be her only failing. When I read her, I’m entirely transported to a different world—but I only see half of that world. And it makes me itchy. I’m generally pretty scornful of the literary sub-genre of Jane Austen “sequels” by modern-day writers, but if someone wanted to have a hand at Below Stairs at Rosings or Pride, Prejudice & Pewter Polishing, I’d be right there.
Anyway, back to Emma. The reason for her misery is, of course, the way playing Cupid has blown up in her face. She’s spent weeks pitching Harriet Smith at Mr. Elton, only to learn, in the most humiliating manner imaginable, that the vicar’s catcher’s mitt is oiled only for her.
It’s rough going for Emma, this being wrongbusiness. And sober introspection isn’t exactly her superpower. But give her credit, she has a proper go at it, and even manages to get her priorities more or less right. Meaning, she’s upset less about the injury to her own self-esteem, than to that of her hapless victim.
Such a blow for Harriet!—that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and humiliation of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—more in error—more disgraced by mis-judgement than she actually was,—could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself.
She then retraces all the various maneuvers of the whole sorry campaign and tries to imagine how on earth she got everything so ass-backwards. For one thing, there was that romantically-charged riddle addressed to the recipient’s “ready wit”; Emma now realizes that not even the most bedazzled love-slave of Harriet Smith could ever fool himself into thinking her a ready wit. I mean, Harriet’s one of those people who just might one day, with sufficient distractions, simply forget to breathe and drop dead like a stone.
And yes, Emma admits she had been conscious of Mr. Elton’s “manners to herself [being] unnecessarily gallant”…but she’d passed over it as “a mere error of judgment, of knowledge, or taste, as one proof, among others, that he had not always lived in the best society” (sort of the way Jimmy Carter, when introduced at Buckingham Palace, caused a minor kerfluffle when he swooped in and kissed the Queen Mother on the lips). In any case, Emma considers herself “indebted for her first idea” of Mr. Elton’s true feelings to her brother-in-law, John Knightley—and indebted as well to his brother, who warned her that Mr. Elton would rather pay court to his backyard maple tree than look twice at Harriet Smith. “There was no denying that those brothers had penetration.” (Not for another few chapters, anyway. Then she’ll have no trouble denying it long and loud.)
Emma’s regret and pity for Harriet doesn’t extend to Mr. Elton, for exactly this reason. His sole objective in launching himself at Emma was clearly to vault up the social ladder.
He wanted to marry well, and having the arrogance to raise his eyes to her, pretended to be in love…Sighs and fine words had been given in abundance; but she could hardly devise any set of expressions, or fancy any tone of voice, less allied with real love. She need not trouble herself to pity him. He only wanted to aggrandise and enrich himself; and if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten.
I love, love, love it when Austen gets out her meat cleaver.
In fact, so far from pitying Mr. Elton, Emma is outraged that he ever had the sheer cojones to look at her with a proprietary eye—creepy little oleaginous nobody that he is. “Perhaps it was not fair to expect him to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind…but he must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior.” I mean, right?...He refuses to lower himself to Harriet Smith’s level, but expects Emma Woodhouse to lower herself to his?...And even accuses her of leading him on? Clearly, the man wants shooting.
The upshot is, Emma resolves never, never, never, never to have any hand in matchmaking of any kind, so help her God, may she be struck by lightning and go bald and have her feet fall off from gangrene if she ever dares try it again. Though she’s still thick-headed enough to congratulate herself on having plucked Harriet out of the wooing arms of Robert Martin; her mistake, as she sees it, was merely in not stopping there. Because “now, poor girl, [Harriet’s] peace is cut up for some time…and if she were notto feel this disappointment so very much, I am sure I have not an idea of any body else who would be at all desirable for her:—William Coxe—oh, no, I could not endure William Coxe,—a pert young lawyer.” And give Emma credit, she realizes she’s matchmaking again only about a nanosecond after we do. But clearly, this new resolve of hers is going to be problematic.
What remains now is to go and tell Harriet, who’s sufficiently recovered from her cold to be clobbered with some new debilitating thing. But after a good night’s sleep, Emma feels better about this prospect, because she realizes that Harriet’s nature isn’t “of that superior sort in which the feelings are most acute and retentive”—which is a very nice way of saying she has the emotional depth of your average Irish setter. Even better, the snowfall has continued all night long so Emma awakens to find herself “for many days a most honourable prisoner. No intercourse with Harriet possible but by note; no church for her on Sunday any more than on Christmas-day; and no need to find excuses for Mr. Elton absenting himself.” So she’s able to put the whole messy imbroglio out of her mind and go about her business, possibly happily humming “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.”
Yet the weather doesn’t seem any impediment to Mr. Knightley, who shocks Mr. Woodhouse by tramping on over for a visit, blizzard be damned. “Ah, Mr. Knightley, why do not you stay at home like poor Mr. Elton?” the paterfamilias wails. But when the weather has “improved enough for those to move who must move” (which means the John Knightleys summarily depart), Mr. Elton still doesn’t rear his impeccably coiffed head. Instead he sends Mr. Woodhouse “a long, civil, ceremonious note” announcing his immediate departure for a few weeks in Bath.
Emma is so very okay with this—“Mr. Elton’s absence just at this time was the very thing to be desired. She admired him for contriving it”—though she can’t help being ticked off that in the entirety of the long, blathering note, not only does he pay her no compliments, he doesn’t even mention her name. And she’s, like, Emma Woodhouse, baby, she is not accustomed to anyone cutting her dead like that. She’s sure her father, too, will notice the slight to her, but no, Mr. Woodhouse is far too worried about that long trip to Bath, on which Mr. Elton is sure to be beset by Mongol warlords or be swallowed up in a freak earthquake.   Well, never mind, at least the vicar’s out of the picture for a while. So Emma finally makes her dreaded visit to Harriet—which goes about as well as you can imagine. In fact, “The confession completely renewed [Emma’s] first shame, and the sight of Harriet’s tears made her think that she should never be in charity with herself again.” Oh, sweetheart. Not to worry.
Harriet, however, “bore the intelligence very well, blaming nobody,” and in fact takes it as confirmation of how undeserving she is of anyone as super-superfine as Mr. Elton. “She never could have deserved him; and nobody but so partial and kind a friend as Miss Woodhouse would have thought it possible.” This rising-above-it from Harriet, of all people, is such agony for Emma—“[Harriet’s] grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma’s eyes”—that she’s convinced for a moment (brief enough, but it’s there) that she would be better off if she were more like her unpretentious, unsophisticated friend.
But then, being Emma, she decides it’s “rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant” (she’s half-right, as we’ll discover) and resolves instead just to be a bit more careful about how she dallies with other people’s lives. Which is sort of like Emma resolving to eat up the entire Hartfield estate and then cough it back up in an entirely new configuration. It’s just not going to happen. And a good thing too, because if it did we’d have a much, much shorter novel.
Emma brings Harriet back home with her and strives to “occupy and amuse her, and by books and conversation to drive Mr. Elton from her thoughts”, and ideally get her into such a “state of composure by the time of Mr. Elton’s return as to allow them all to meet again in the common routine of acquaintance” without any shrieking or fainting or pulling hair from one’s own head. Which is important, because it’s not like Harriet can avoidMr. Elton, there being only about eleven people in all of Highbury society.
As if Emma’s world weren’t in enough disarray, the next bit of news she hears is that Frank Churchill is not coming after all. A letter arrives expressing his “very great mortification and regret; but still he looked forward with the hope of coming to Randalls at no distant period.” Mrs. Weston is much, much more dejected by the news than her husband, who has the kind of character that “soon flies over the failure, and begins to hope again”, which would make him an ideal Chicago Cubs fan.
Emma herself, while still wildly curious about Frank, is just fine with his staying put; after burning her fingers, she craves a period of time “to be quiet and out of temptation”, and God love ‘er, she’s sufficiently self-aware to know a visit from Frank Churchill would pretty much torpedo any chance of that. Still, she doesn’t want to appear indifferent to Mrs. Weston and her other friends, who are genuinely disappointed by his change of plans, so she echoes their sentiments very gratifyingly. She even finds herself the first to announce the news to Mr. Knightley, and in the process “exclaimed quite as much as was necessary (or, being acting a part, perhaps rather more,) at the conduct of the Churchills in keeping him away.” This is the only reference we have to an Austen heroine explicitly “acting a part” (as opposed to Austen villainesses, like Lucy Steele and Maria Bertram), and it’s one of the reasons we love her; she’s complex—she has layers—and she’s also such a magnificent sham.
Her vilification of the Churchills for keeping Frank from visiting his father and new stepmother, prompts Mr. Knightley to take the opposing view, to Emma’s “great amusement” as “she was taking the other side of the question from her real opinion, and, making use of Mrs. Weston’s arguments against herself.” So immediately this is starting out deliciously.
And the argument that follows—which ranges (and rages) over six full pages—is just flat-out scintillating. Emma and Knightley going at it hammer and tong is every bit as thrilling as any of Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s scorched-earth confrontations. It’s miraculously paced, every beat resounding like a cannon shot. I can’t really do it justice—not without quoting the entire thing to you—but here’s the upshot:
Mr. Knightley isn’t at all impressed by the prevailing opinion—which is that poor Frank is being kept from seeing his father and paying respects to his new stepmother, by the selfish demands of his adopted family. He is, after all, a grown man, and if he had a mind to come, he would find the time and the means to do just that.
Emma argues that Mr. Knightley, having never been beholden to anyone in his life, can’t appreciate the kind of dependency Frank Churchill lives under. But Knightley scoffs at that.
“He cannot want money, he cannot want leisure. We know, on the contrary, that he has so much of both, that he is glad to get rid of them at the idlest haunts in the kingdom. We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other; a little while ago he was at Weymouth. This proves that he can leave the Churchills.”
“Yes, sometimes he can.”
“And those times are, whenever he thinks it worth his while; whenever there is any temptation of pleasure.”
Emma calls this unfair, because no one should “judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation”, which is how you know she’s arguing just for the sake of argument, because she herself could win an Olympic gold medal in Jumping To Conclusions. Brazenly she plows on, protesting that Frank “may, at times, be able to do a great deal more than he can do at others,” and Mr. Knightley immediately shoots back that “There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is his duty”.
“A man who felt rightly would say at once, simply and resolutely, to Mrs. Churchill, ‘Every sacrifice of mere pleasure you will always find me ready to make to your convenience; but I must go and see my father immediately. I know he would be hurt by my failing in such a mark of respect to him on the present occasion. I shall, therefore, set off to-morrow.’ If he would say so to her at once, in the tone of decision becoming a young man, there would be no opposition made to his going.”
“No,” said Emma, laughing, “but perhaps there might be some made to his coming back again.”
She then conjures Frank striding around the room, bellowing his independence and beating his chest like a gorilla; “How can you imagine such conduct practicable?” But Mr. Knightley won’t be baited—“[T]he declaration,—made, of course, as a man of sense would make it, in a proper manner,—would do him more good, raise him higher, fix his interest stronger with the people he depended on, than all that a line of shifts and expedients can ever do…”
“…If he would act in this sort of manner, on principle, consistently, regularly, their little minds would bend to his.”
“I rather doubt that. You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.”
And here’s another, just plain stellar exchange, from a few paragraphs later. Emma argues:
“[Frank] may have as strong a sense of what would be right as you can have, without being so equal, under particular circumstances, to act up to it.”
“Then, it would not be so strong a sense.”
And another one, opening with this salvo from Mr. Knightley:
“[Frank] can sit down and write a fine flourishing letter, full of professions and falsehoods, and persuade himself that he has hit upon the best method in the world of preserving peace at home, and preventing his father’s having any right to complain. His letters disgust me.”
“Your feelings are singular. They seem to satisfy every body else.”
“I suspect they do not satisfy Mrs. Weston.”
If this were a tennis match—and it would be Wimbledon-level, if it were—I can imagine the scorekeeper’s ears beginning to smoke as he tried to follow the sheer swiftness and force of these volleys; at this point we ourselves don’t have any clue as to who’s winning the match…though we expect it’s Mr. Knightley, if only because Emma has admitted at the outset (to herself, anyway) that she’s playing a part—that it is, for her, an academic exercise; a rhetorical romp.
But…is it? Her feathers are totally ruffled by the end of it, and she’s seriously turned off by Mr. Knightley’s smug superiority.
To take a dislike to a young man, only because he appeared to be of a different disposition from himself, was unworthy the real liberality of mind which she was always used to acknowledge in him; for with all the high opinion of himself, which she had often laid to his charge, she had never before for a moment supposed it could make him unjust to the merit of another.
We’re pretty sure by now that Emma doesn’t pick fights with Mr. Knightley out of boredom, or for the fun of arguing a position not her own. She contends with him because he’s gotten under her skin. Deep down, she wants his good opinion, but she resents wanting it—probably because he doesn’t appear to want hers in return. It’s this self-contained quality of his that she finds both so appealing and so maddening; she has as strong a desire to understand it, and to emulate it, as she has to crack it wide open and spill its contents at her feet.
In other words, her heart is at stake here. She doesn’t know it yet. But we’ve spent most of the novel being a step ahead of Emma Woodhouse, and we don’t mind waiting for her to catch up. She’s vain, peremptory, and a thoroughly heinous busybody; but she makes us laugh. So we not only forgive her, we love her for it. In fact, we’re far from impatient for her to catch up with us; if we could, we’d turn and call out to her, “No hurry, darlin’…take your time!”
And believe me, she’s going to.

Emma, chapters 13-15

We now jump ahead a few days into the visit of the John Knightleys to Highbury, which is filled with incident and activity, and has one other crucial ingredient. “It was a delightful visit,” Austen cheekily tells us; “—perfect, in being much too short.”
Only a true misanthrope could pen those words. Of course prickly, difficult people everywhere love her.
The Knightleys dine each night en famille at Hartfield, but can’t escape an invitation from Randalls, the Westons’ house—Mrs. Weston having been Isabella’s governess as much as Emma’s—and Christmas Eve is the night chosen for this “great event”, to which Mr. Elton and Harriet Smith are invited along with the family. But on the day itself Harriet has to cancel due to a bad sore throat, “though she could not speak of her loss without many tears.”
Emma, dedicated as ever to fixing everything for everybody, is convinced that Harriet’s absence will ruin the party for Mr. Elton; and furthermore that freeing him from having to attend will give him the opportunity to linger by the sickbed and tend lovingly to the patient and say things like Live, live, o sweetest angel, or by your demise my life becomes a ruin, and other similar inducements for Harriet to feel better.
And in fact he does seem a little wound up by Harriet’s condition, as Emma discovers when she meets him by chance, just after she’s left Mrs. Goddard’s, and tells him the news.
“A sore throat!—I hope not infectious. I hope not of a putrid infectious sort. Has Perry seen her? Indeed you should take care of yourself as well as your friend. Let me entreat you to run no risks. Why does Perry not see her?”
Emma is, of course, “not really at all frightened herself,” because dammit she’s Emma Woodhouse and those bacteria wouldn’t dare. Also she doesn’t think Harriet’s illness requires any treatment beyond what Mrs. Goddard can supply. But she’s diabolical; she doesn’t say so, preferring that Mr. Elton suffer “a degree of uneasiness which she could not wish to reason away, which she would rather feed and assist than not”. And onto this she lards some additional heavy-handed manipulation.
“It is so cold, so very cold, and looks and feels so very much like snow, that if it were to any other place or with any other party, I should really try not to go out to-day…But upon my word, Mr. Elton, in your case, I should certainly excuse myself. You appear to me a little hoarse already; and when you consider what demand of voice and what fatigues to-morrow will bring, I think it would be no more than common prudence to stay at home and take care of yourself to-night.”
But Mr. Elton couldn’t give a good goddamn about his Christmas sermon. If his voice goes, fine, he’ll just pantomime, or stage an interpretive dance. And when John Knightley offers him a seat in his carriage even that threat is removed, so there it is, he’s Randalls-bound…”and never had his broad, handsome expressed more pleasure than at this moment”—completely perplexing Emma. How can he think of enjoying himself in company when his beloved languishes elsewhere—as Harriet would surely be doing, if she knew what “languishes” means? Eventually she decides that many men—“especially single men”—just can’t pass up a dinner engagement. It’s “so high in the class of their pleasures, their employments, their dignities, almost their duties, that any thing gives way to it”. (Obviously this was written before the arrival of cable sports.)
After he’s gone, John Knightley, whose favorite hobby is sizing up everyone’s character—sizing it up if only to tear it down—has a go at this one:
“I never in my life saw a man more intent on being agreeable than Mr. Elton. It is downright labour to him where ladies are concerned. With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please every feature works.”
Emma admits he can be rough going, but counters that there is “such perfect good temper and good will in Mr. Elton as one cannot but value.” To which Mr. Knightley says, good will towards you that’s for sure, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, knowhumsayin’.
Emma is shocked, shocked by the idea—I mean really, you can tell by her reaction that it has absolutely never occurred to her before. She’s really been that much of an idiot the whole novel. She’s young, beautiful, rich, and vivacious, and she knows it—not only knows it, but glories in it—yet it’s never occurred to her that some hot-blooded young turk might look at her and think, “I’m’a get me summadat.”
“Mr. Elton in love with me! What an idea!”
“I do not say it is so; but you will do well to consider whether it is so or not, and to regulate your behavior accordingly. I think your manners to him encouraging. I speak as a friend, Emma. You had better look about you, and ascertain what you do, and what you mean to do.”
But Emma utterly refuses to consider it. Instead, like Republicans un-skewing polls, she frames his advice in the way most concordant with her own point of which, which after all she knows is the correct one, and amuses herself “in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into”, and once again, you’re tempted to say, Well, honey, you’d know.
Austen cuts directly to the hour of departure, and find Mr. Woodhouse “too full of the wonder of his own going, and the pleasure it was to afford at Randalls to see that it was cold, and too well wrapt up to feel it.” But it is cold, and the skies are heavy, and in fact the first few flakes are even now wafting down, and everyone is very, very busy getting out the door while pretending they’re not heading into a real whopper of a winter storm.
All, that is, except Mr. John Knightley, who now reveals himself to be a spectacular sourpuss and killjoy, and who can—not—be—lieve everybody is actually going through with this ridiculous romp to Randalls, and who grumbles and groans and snarls about it with amazing energy and brio.
“A man,” said he, “must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fire-side, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow; I could not do such a thing. It is the greatest absurdity—actually snowing at this moment! The folly of not allowing people to be comfortable at home—and the folly of people not staying comfortably at home when they can! If we were obliged to go out such an evening as this, by any call of duty or business, what a hardship we should deem it;—and here we are, probably with rather thinner clothing than usual, setting forward voluntarily, without excuse, in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in every thing given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself, and keep all under shelter that he can…”
It doesn’t even end there; he just go goes on and on, and you get the impression that Mr. John Knightley is actually Jane Austen’s revenge on some blowhard who ruined a perfectly good evening for her by bitching incessantly about its inconvenience to himself. She’s just gone and immortalized him, so there you go, how’s that for an inconvenience, asshat. The only trouble is, Austen’s comic genius transforms this revenge into a hilarious comic turn; you can almost picture Emma—his sole carriage-mate—crawling halfway out the window to get away from him, but he’s only saying what everyone else is thinking. In this chapter, John Knightley is definitely our favorite. We’ve loved many of Austen’s epic talkers; here’s her first epic complainer.
They pull up at the vicarage, and Mr. Elton, “spruce, black, and smiling, was with them instantly”, leaping into the carriage like some kind of demented Christmas elf. He’s “all obligation and cheerfulness”—in fact “so very cheerful in his civilities indeed, that (Emma) began to think he must have received a different account of Harriet from what had reached her”—which is that she is sadly no better.
Emma launches right into the subject of poor, poor Harriet, and Mr. Elton immediately gratifies her by letting his face droop in dismay and echoing and even trumping her own feelings of loss at Harriet not being here. “Dreadful! Exactly so, indeed. She will be missed every moment.”
This was very proper; the sigh which accompanied it was really estimable; but it should have lasted longer. Emma was rather in dismay when only half a minute afterwards he began to speak of other things, and in a voice of the greatest alacrity and enjoyment.
This is a sure sign of a writer at the height of her powers. Austen’s party scenes are always her most sparklingly funny set pieces, and here we are having the time of our life, and we haven’t even left the carriage yet. For one thing, we’ve got John Knightley, determined to be annoyed and put out by everything around him, and Mr. Elton, equally determined to be the most gleeful living being in the entire kingdom if not the solar system. So of course everything that Mr. Elton says is going to jab John Knightley’s already bad humor like a porcupine quill. And Mr. Elton starts off at a roar, delivering a very long and very perky monologue about how cozy he is, which prompts a lazy snarl from his coach-mate; he continues, seemingly unable to shut up for a moment, to barrel on about the snowy weather being ideal, do you hear me ideal, then segues into contemplating the happy happy happy time awaiting them all, and Austen doesn’t say so but I’m pretty sure he claps his hands.
“This is quite the season, indeed, for friendly meetings. At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather. I was snowed up at a friend’s house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter. I went for only one night, and could not get away till that very day se’nnight.”
Mr. John Knightley looked as if he did not comprehend the pleasure, but said only, coolly,—
“I cannot wish to be snowed up a week at Randalls.”
Austen tells us Emma “might have been amused” by the way John Knightley so efficiently bites Mr. Elton’s head off, but for her astonishment at Mr. Elton’s raging high spirits: “Harriet seemed quite forgotten in the expectation of a pleasant party.” Her loss, because the hilarity continues, Mr. Elton gibbering on like a bliss ninny and John Knightley taking an occasional swipe at him, like a sulking lion annoyed by a monkey that keeps capering too close. Miss Bates is remembered as Emma’s nonstop natterer, but she’s going to have to be really on her game to beat Mr. Elton in this chapter.
Unfortunately they soon arrive at Randalls, where “Mr. Elton must smile less, and Mr. John Knightley more, to fit them for the place.” But it’s academic to Emma, because she bolts from the both of them to bask in the confidences of her hostess, who’s basically her totes bestie. “…[T]he very sight of Mrs. Weston, her smile, her touch, her voice, was grateful to Emma, and she determined to think as little as possible of Mr. Elton’s oddities, or of any thing else unpleasant, and enjoy all that was enjoyable to the utmost.”
Alas for Emma, her “project of forgetting Mr. Elton for a while made her rather sorry to find, when they had all taken their places, that he was close to her.” And close as he is, he acts even closer, constantly hovering over her and winking at her and tossing her little bon mots; he may as well be sitting in her lap. And Harriet may as well be on a slow boat to China. Emma is forced to consider the unthinkable: “Can it really be as my brother imagined? Can it be possible for this man to be beginning to transfer his affections from Harriet to me?—Absurd and insufferable.” Notice, please, that she can only just bring herself to believe this is a new infatuation—she can’t conceive that she’s been getting it wrong all along…that Harriet was never the object of his particularly oily affections.
Mr. Elton’s incessant sallies into personal space makes her almost miss something “which she particularly wished to listen to” across the room—that being news of Mr. Weston’s son, Frank Churchill. Because, “in spite of Emma’s resolution of never marrying, there was something in the name, in the idea, of Mr. Frank Churchill, which always interested her.”
He seemed, by this connection between the families, quite to belong to her…and though not meaning to be induced by him, or by any body else, to give up a situation which she believed more replete with good than any she could change it for, she had a great curiosity to see him, a decided intention of finding him pleasant, of being liked by him to a certain degree, and a sort of pleasure in the idea of their being coupled in their friends’ imaginations.
That’s our Emma. She’s got no intention of ever marrying anybody, yet she’s already got a potential fiancé picked out—if only for the satisfaction of being talked about. She’s pretty much decided that she owns Frank Churchill, but she’ll have to have a good look at him and run him through his paces before she decides whether she actually wants him. Aren’t we going to relish seeing this blow up in her face? Not that we don’t love her; but we love her best when she’s reeling from an unexpected right hook.
Fortunately, Frank’s name comes up again—Mr. Western reintroduces it in “the very first leisure from the saddle of mutton,” which I include just to remind you that we’re dealing with a goddamn writerhere (you think phrases that simple and euphonious are easy to toss off? Listen to my caustic laughter)—and Emma learns to her delight that Frank Churchill is expected soon to come a-callin’.
“He has those to please who must be pleased, and who (between ourselves) are sometimes to be pleased only by a good many sacrifices. But now I have no doubt of seeing him here about the second week in January.”
This titanic news is processed over the next several pages by many of the cast, who minutely discuss their various anticipations and trepidations of the visit, and what might yet occur to put it off, except that Mr. Weston says such eventualities won’t occur, though Mrs. Weston quietly fears they will, and yadda yadda yadda. This is one of the only sections in which Emma lags a bit. We get the impression Austen is already a little girl crazy for Frank Churchill herself, and we wish she’d get back to the serious business of torpedoing the party already.
Which she will…but we have to be patient.
Mr. Woodhouse, we’re told, “was soon ready for his tea; and when he had drank his tea he was quite ready to go home”—but “Mr. Weston was chatty and convivial, and no friend to early separations of any sort;” so no one’s going anywhere, though we’ve got John Knightley looking meaningfully at the hall clock and tapping his foot, and making little tsk-y noises whenever anyone says something especially trivial that really doesn’t need to be expressed at all and certainly not right now. I can almost see everybody just slowly inching away from him, as from a bad smell.
Mr. Elton launches himself into the space between Mrs. Weston and Emma—possibly it’s not quite big enough and he has to elbow in a bit, to the point of Mrs. Weston almost falling off the couch—but then gratifies Emma by beginning again to pity poor, poor, poor, sick, sad, lonely, at-death’s-door Harriet, so that soon “Emma was quite in charity with him.” Except…he seems more anxious about Emma escaping infection than he is about Harriet recovering from it, and keeps asking Emma to promise she won’t put herself at risk. This is very embarrassing for Emma, because Mr. Elton is presuming some kind of proprietorship of her (who does he think he is, Emma with Frank Churchill?).
…[T]hough she tried to laugh it off and bring the subject back into its proper course, there was no putting an end to his extreme solicitude about her. She was vexed. It did appear—there was no concealing it—exactly like the pretence of being in love with her, instead of Harriet; an inconstancy, if real, the most contemptible and abominable!
Even now Emma can’t quite accept the evidence of her own eyes and ears. It’s like a “pretence” of love…it’s a contemptible thing, “if real.” And once again, she sees it purely in terms of “inconstancy”—of Mr. Elton having switched from Harriet to Emma in mid-courtship; the notion that it’s been Emma he’s been paddling for all along, has never crossed her mind. Her cluelessness is really Olympian. (It wasn’t by whim that Amy Heckerling titled her modern-day film adaptation of the story Clueless.)
Mr. Elton now pushes the envelope by trying to enlist Mrs. Weston in his crusade to bar Emma from putting her superfine self at any further risk.
“So scrupulous for others,” he continued, “and yet so careless for herself! She wanted me to nurse my cold by staying at home to-day, and yet will not promise to avoid the danger of catching an ulcerated throat herself. Is this fair, Mrs. Weston? Judge between us. Have not I some right to complain?”
Mrs. Weston is too surprised to answer, or possibly she just can’t figure out a polite way to say, “The only right you have is to shut your goddamn pie-hole.” As for Emma, she’s too furious to speak, and can “only give him a look; but it was such a look as she thought must restore him to his senses”, not realizing that this doesn’t work with people who have no senses to be restored to.
Emma’s let us down by taking this silently; we need a good, solid explosion of tumult right about now, for this to be a standard-bearing Jane Austen party. Fortunately, John Knightley is happy to supply it. He’s been off at the window monitoring the weather, just waiting for it to get bad enough so that he can return to the others and crow about it. His basic message is, I was right and you were wrong, and now we’re all screwed because you didn’t listen to me, so there, and I hope you’re happy.
Everyone’s thrown into a tizzy, especially Mr. Woodhouse, for whom this is just confirmation of the essential malevolence of everything beyond his own front door. Mrs. Weston and Emma try to distract him from panic, possibly by making hand-shadows on the wall, or engaging in a tumbling routine—anything to “turn his attention from his son-in-law, who was pursuing his triumph rather unfeelingly.” Yes, rather unfeelingly, in the same way you could say that the Mongols under Genghis Khan were rather harsh.
“I admired your resolution very much, sir,” said (John Knightley), “in venturing out in such weather, for of course you saw there would be snow very soon. Every body must have seen the snow coming on. I admired your spirit; and I dare say we shall get home very well. Another hour or two’s snow can hardly make the road impassable; and we are two carriages; if one is blown over in the bleak part of the common field there will be the other at hand.”
This is about the worst thing you could say to Mr. Woodhouse. You might as well tell him, “There’s a tsunami cresting straight for us—but never mind, the giant asteroid will probably vaporize it.”
Mr. Weston now, “with a triumph of a different sort,” admits that he’s known all along that it’s been snowing like a sonuvabitch, but didn’t say anything because it would be such fun to keep everyone at Randalls for the night (why he’s so hot on this idea remains a mystery; you’d think he was a vampire squaring away his midnight snacks or something). He then calls on his wife to back him up, “that, with a little contrivance, every body might be lodged, which she hardly knew how to do, from the consciousness of there being but two spare rooms in the house.”
So now we have it—the complete dissolution of the party, as everyone runs around like headless chickens, particularly Isabella, who’s nearly deranged by the “horror of being blocked up at Randalls, while her children were at Hartfield”. Emma and Mr. Woodhouse can stay at Randalls if they like, but she’s bound and determined to brave the snow to get back to her babies, who you’d think she left in the care of itinerant gypsies instead of her own small army of nursery staff. And if the carriage gets stuck, why she’ll just tear across the snowy fields herself, and possibly perish in the attempt, leaving the poor Romantics of the Victorian era no new literary genre to invent.
Her husband scoffs at the idea of her going on foot—especially her claim that “it is not the sort of thing that gives me cold”, which he counters by pointing out that everything gives her cold. She’s Mr. Woodhouse’s daughter, after all; a single lazy breeze on a sweltering summer day might lay her flat with pneumonia.
In the midst of all this hysteria, Mr. Knightley arrives like the cavalry to save the day. He’s just gone outside and walked all the way down the Highbury road and back, and can vouch for there being no difficulty in anybody getting anywhere they want to go tonight, the snow is just a dusting, no impediment at all. His brother John, who after all has had his fun and got to upset everybody and spoil the party, doesn’t object to being thus debunked. Possibly he’s even gratified, because now he can leave—in fact everyone rushes to leave, because they’ve been so keyed up to do so for twenty minutes, they can’t wind back down again. Poor Mrs. Weston has probably been upstairs madly having all the beds made up, and she’ll come down in half an hour and no one will be here.
They pile into the two carriages—Mr. Woodhouse and Isabella in the first, and “John Knightley, forgetting that he did not belong to their party, stept in after his wife very naturally,” so that Emma finds herself stuck in the second carriage with Mr. Elton. And you can just imagine the look of leering satisfaction on his face when that door shuts behind them and they’re alone together. He might even rub his hands and mutter, Haha! And now you are mine! Even worse, Emma suspects that “he had been drinking too much of Mr. Weston’s good wine; and felt sure that he would want to be talking nonsense.”
And not just talking, either. Emma has barely begun “to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and the night” when he seizes her hand and begins “making violent love to her: availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already well known, hoping—fearing—adoring—ready to die if she refused him”—well, that last bit’s a load of crap, as we learn almost immediately, because Emma does refuse him, reminding him that, ahem, this is Emma-land, and the role he’s been assigned in Emma-land is Lover of Miss Smith, so would he please stop this silly pretending that he lives in a world where he can decide his own destiny and just do as he’s told?
Now it’s Mr. Elton’s turn to be astonished. He spits out the name “Miss Smith!” as though it’s something foul-tasting he’s just dislodged from his teeth. He’s “drunk enough wine to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects”, and Harriet Smith is nothing more to him than the friend of Miss Woodhouse, in which capacity he has no more regard for her than he would the maiden aunt of Miss Woodhouse, or the pet King Charles spaniel of Miss Woodhouse, or the breakfast-table chair of Miss Woodhouse. It’s Miss Woodhouse that’s the galvanizing factor here, and he “resumed the subject of his own passion, and was very urgent for a favorable answer.”
“Every thing that I have said or done, for many weeks past, has been with the sole view of marking my adoration of yourself. You cannot really, seriously doubt it. No! (in an accent meant to be insinuating) I am sure you have seen and understood me.”
Emma’s stunned into silence by this. The boozy Mr. Elton takes this for admission; he has another grab at her hand and crows in triumph, forcing Emma to recoil into the corner—unfortunately, this being Regency England, she hasn’t thought to carry pepper-spray in her pocket book—and repeats that no, no, no, no, no, you love Miss Smith, remember? Miss Smith—as if saying it often enough will make it so. Which prompts Mr. Elton to once again express his disgust at the idea.
“Every body has their level; but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith! No, madam, my visits to Hartfield have been for yourself only; and the encouragement I received—”
This word “encouragement” throws Emma into a little fit of indignation, not only for its own sake, but probably—I’m willing to bet principally—because it’s exactly what John Knightley warned her of. John Knightley was right, and his brother was right too, and Emma now realizes she’s been spectacularly, magnificently, cataclysmically wrong, and this is a young woman who’s entire self-image is built on the foundation that it is she, after God, who orders all reality.
She’s mad as a wet hen at Mr. Elton for bringing down her house of cards, and she puts him in his place with bitter crispness, as though he were a bad puppy whose snout she has to swat with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Encouragement! I give you encouragement!—sir, you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it. I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend. In no other light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance. I am exceedingly sorry; but it as well that the mistake ends where it does.”
The mistake may end where it does, but the carriage ride continues for many minutes more. Awwwkward, as they say. Emma and Mr. Elton sit in a “state of swelling resentment, and mutually deep mortification,” not saying a word. Finally the coach turns into Vicarage Lane, Mr. Elton flings open the door to depart, and “Emma then felt it indispensable to wish him a good night. The compliment was just returned, coldly and proudly; and under indescribable irritation of spirits, she was then conveyed to Hartfield.”
As if to mock her, when she gets home she finds everybody serenely happy—the reverse of the fractious, contentious crew who’d departed so noisily from Randalls—with Mr. John Knightley so penitent for his earlier rabble-rousing that he’s actually consented to join Mr. Woodhouse in a basin of gruel. Order is restored, just as Emma would’ve wished; but now there’s chaos in her heart, and in her head.
Will she learn from this calamity, and curb her arrogance and presumption in the future? Bugger will she.

Emma, chapters 10-12

We come now to a run of chapters that show the range of Austen’s comic mastery, from the physical to what I might even call the burlesque.
We begin with Harriet accompanying Emma on an errand in the neighborhood which takes them past the vicarage, that “blessed abode of Mr. Elton,” which is a not terribly remarkable house sandwiched in among a few others of even lesser quality. But given the role Mr. Elton plays in their mutual psychodrama, “there could be no possibility of the two friends passing it without a slackened pace and observing eyes.” Emma even elbows Harriet and says, “There go you and your riddle-book one of these days.”
Harriet twitters and chirps and flits around the perimeter like a bluejay with salt on its tail, and “her curiosity to see it was so extreme, that…Emma could only class it, as a proof of love, with Mr. Elton’s seeing ready wit in her.” Emma laments that she can’t think of any way to get Harriet inside for a look.
As they walk on, Harriet finally says—having stumbled on a thought you might’ve imagine she’d have had fifty pages earlier—“I do so wonder, Miss Woodhouse, that you should not be married, or going to be married—so charming as you are.” Which prompts Emma to go off on a little self-infatuated rant, beginning with, “My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to induce me to marry; I must find other people charming—one other person at least.” And even that might be insufficient, because what possible benefit could marriage bring to Emma Woodhouse?
“Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want. I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”
Harriet bleats and whinnies some more, about how awful it would be, though, “to be an old maid at last, like Miss Bates!” And Emma admits that “(I)f I thought I should ever be like Miss Bates—so silly, so satisfied, so smiling, so prosing, so undistinguishing and unfastidious, and so apt to tell every thing relative to every body about me, I would marry to-morrow.” But there’s no chance of that happening, because Emma is already a paragon of womanly perfection—sort of the Virgin Mary cross-bred with Margaret Thatcher. And that’s not all.
“(I)t is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls…for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.”
What I find most remarkable about this outburst is that it’s one of the rare examples of Austen making fun of herself. Because who else is Emma describing here, but her own creator? I can picture Austen penning these words, snorting impishly to herself, while her sister Cassandra peers over her shoulder and says, “Illiberal and cross…yes, indeed.”
And then they throw spools of thread at each other or something.
Emma goes blithely and arrogantly on, declaring that she sees no reason “why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty…If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work.” You’ve got to imagine Lady Catherine de Bourgh was no less sure of the course of her life at seventeen, than Emma is here. She’s a monster in the making, but we’re already seen that she’s also her own worst enemy—she just doesn’t know it yet. We’re going to enjoy seeing her find out.
Emma concludes her little diatribe by declaring she doesn’t need children, she has her nieces and nephews, and declares “I shall often have a niece with me”, which leads Harriet to note that Miss Bates has a niece, doesn’t she? What’s her name again? The one everyone’s just super extra crazy about?...Oh yes, Jane Fairfax.
At this mention of Jane Fairfax, all the wind goes out of Emma’s sails. Jane Fairfax is her bugbear, her bête noir; a girl exactly her own age with whom she is always compared, and to whom she’s always proposed as an ideal friend. Except Emma doesn’t like being compared to anybody, and would rather choose her own friends, thanks, and you quickly get the impression that if Jane Fairfax fell down a hole, Emma would just quietly fill it in.
It turns out Jane Fairfax has gone off to be the paid companion of a rich couple’s daughter, so you’d think Emma would be sitting pretty, having her rival out of the way and all of Highbury to herself. Unfortunately, Jane’s physical absence doesn’t mean her tiresome effect isn’t still felt.
“Every letter from her is read forty times over: her compliments to all friends go round and round again; and if she does but send her aunt the pattern of a stomacher, or knit a pair of garters for her grandmother, one hears of nothing else for a month. I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me to death.”
It grates on Emma that Jane Fairfax’s miserable little achievements are trumpeted by everyone, at the expense of her own much more Herculean accomplishments. Do they think it’s easy arranging marriages for everyone in her immediate vicinity? She’s not Rev. Moon, you know—she just can’t point to two people on a football field and make it so. She has to work.
Fortunately she and Harriet now arrive at their destination, which is the cottage of a sick villager, so all talk of Jane Fairfax ceases as Emma goes into Angel Of Mercy mode. Which, we’re told, she does surprisingly well, though there’s an element of noblesse oblige in her manner that doesn’t entirely recommend her to modern readers.
She understood (the poor’s) ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little, entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good will.
And then, back outside, she enthuses about how much wonderful perspective the visit has given her. “I feel now as if I could think of nothing but these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet who can say how soon it may vanish from my mind?”
Um. We can, sugar.
(I shouldn’t be too hard on her; I certainly prefer Emma’s brand of pragmatic condescension to, say, the Victorian inclination to breast-beating empathy, which seems even more self-centered at its core.)
As if to prove the evanescence of Emma’s social consciousness, Mr. Elton appears around the bend, and Emma pretends to steel herself against this sudden onslaught of charm.
“Ah, Harriet, here comes a very sudden trial of our stability in good thoughts. Well (smiling), I hope it may be allowed that if compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it has done all that is truly important. If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves.”
Harriet could just answer, “Oh dear, yes,” before the gentleman joined them.
I love that last bit; as though it was just Mr. Elton’s arrival that prevented Harriet from saying something weightier. When as we know by now, “Oh dear, yes,” is about as profound a response as she ever makes to anything.
But as to what precedes it—Emma’s rationalizing away her waning thoughts of her ailing beneficiaries—this, again, might be thought almost Lady Catherine-like, except for that small, masterful, parenthetic insertion that lets us know Emma is aware of her own pomposity, and is able to smile at it. If Emma is truly to become a monster, this is the element of her character—her self-awareness; her genial acceptance of whims aswhims—that has to go.
But of course, Austen has other plans for her.
It turns out that Elton was on his way to visit the same sick parishioner; but now that Emma’s already been there, he needn’t bother, so he’s free to join them in their amble back—at least as far as his house. Emma is immediately alive to the opportunities now presented, to get Harriet and Elton alone together. “I should not wonder if it were to bring on the declaration.” In fact, she doesn’t wonder, she’s certain of it. The only impediment is her own presence.
And so we get a masterful set piece that progresses over several pages, of Emma scheming to get herself out of the picture so that the presumed lovers can be alone. She falls behind and takes a small footpath off the main road; but “Harriet’s habits of dependence and imitation” prompt her to follow as soon as she notices this, and Mr. Elton tags dutifully behind. Then Emma pretends to have some problem with her shoe, stoops down to fix it, and waves them both on, saying she’ll catch up in a moment. This almost works, but Emma is then “overtaken by a child from the cottage, setting out, according to orders, with her pitcher, to fetch broth from Hartfield,” so Emma is compelled to walk alongside her, and as the child walks very fast and Harriet and Elton very slowly, they soon all catch up again.
Emma sends the child on ahead and listens in to Elton’s conversation, hoping at least to find him speaking on some subject suitably amorous; but he’s raving about a lunch party he attended the day before—braying about Stilton and beet-root and whatever. Emma is a touch crestfallen, but convinced that “This would soon have led to something better,” though God only knows how. Is there anything in the world less erotic than Stilton and beet-root?
Now they’re coming hard on the Vicarage, so time is of the essence. Emma actually now bends down and surreptitiously snaps her boot-lace, so that she’s hobbled; she begs Mr. Elton’s pardon, but she’ll have to avail herself of his hospitality “and ask your housekeeper for a bit of riband or string, or any thing just to keep my boot on.”
Elton of course could not be more delighted to be of assistance. If he and Emma were Victorians, he might even pick her right up and carry her into the house—during which her bonnet would fall off and her hair come tumbling gorgeously down. Possibly it might also rain. But fortunately we’re still in the Regency, a good three or four decades from that kind of thing.
Emma goes off with the housekeeper, leaving her two protégés alone together, and “by engaging the housekeeper in incessant conversation she hoped to make it practicable for (Elton) to choose his own subject in the adjoining room.” Meaning, for Elton to choose her own subject. Meaning, my sweet Miss Smith—may I call you Harriet—allow me to proclaim how entirely you have bewitched me.
Emma allows plenty of time for these syllables to be uttered, with additional time for the ensuing Oh my yes indeeds and Goodness how agreeables from Harriet. Then she reenters the room to find the two of them at the window, looking very intimate—but alas, exchanging nothing but chit-chat. “(H)e told Harriet that he had seen them go by, and had purposely followed them; other little gallantries and allusions had been dropped, but nothing serious.”
“Cautious, very cautious,” thought Emma; “he advances inch by inch, and will hazard nothing till he believes himself secure.”
And so she convinces herself that while she hasn’t actually sealed the deal between them, “she could not but flatter herself that it had been the occasion of much present enjoyment to both, and must be leading them forward to the great event.”
And they’ll have to lead themselves from this point on, because Emma’s distracted by a much greater event, which is the arrival of her sister Isabella and her brother-in-law Mr. John Knightley. Oh, and their five (yes, five) children, plus “a competent number of nursery-maids,” which in my opinion qualifies less as a visit than an occupation. Why not throw in a band of minstrels and a circus aerial act while you’re at it?
It’s been a long while since the John Knightleys have been seen at Hartfield. Emma’s eagerness to see them is about on par with her father’s anxieties on their behalf, because the journey is sixteen miles, during which he imagines pretty much anything might beset them—foul weather, attacks by bears, leprosy, you name it. Of course they arrive unscathed, unleashing “a noise and confusion which (Mr. Woodhouse’s) nerves could not have borne under any other cause, nor have endured much longer even for this”.
Isabella is “a pretty, elegant little woman” whom Austen at first seems to dismiss with all the praise she usually portions out to those females who don’t interest her. She’s dutiful, quiet, devoted, etc. Accordingly we don’t have much hope of her, until we hear this:
She was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness; and with this resemblance of her father, she inherited also much of his constitution; was delicate in her own health, over-careful of that of her children, had many fears and many nerves, and was as fond of her own Mr. Wingfield in town as her father could be of Mr. Perry.
All right, then: there are now two of them under one roof. And—as we know from many misspent hours in our youth watching Godzilla vs. Mothraand the like—the rule for these situations is, There can be only one.
John Knightley, on the other hand, is in every way the opposite of his father-in-law: robust, confident, ambitious and “rising in his profession,” and apt to be impatient and bad-tempered and speak his mind in ways that mortify the paterfamilias. Accordingly he is “not a great favourite with his sister-in-law. Nothing wrong in him escaped her. She was quick in feeling the little injuries to Isabella, which Isabella never felt herself.” What’s worse, knowing that he’s liable to blurt out some snide remark to her father, Emma is always on red alert when they’re in a room together, which forces on her “all the pain of apprehension frequently to be endured, though the offence came not.”
In short, the house is now filled with a riot of people and possibilities entirely out of Emma’s control. And the one thing we’ve learned for certain about her is that she’s someone who relishes, and has managed to exercise, the kind of control usually only accorded to Russian autocrats.
As the family catch up on events, it’s only natural that the marriage of “poor Miss Taylor” should be covered in depth, capped by another review of the letter Frank Churchill wrote to congratulate his new stepmother—the letter that seems to have so deranged everyone in Highbury that if the sun were five degrees hotter they might just run mad and start eating human flesh. Mr. Woodhouse can barely contain his admiration for the letter’s excellence, which he recounts with all the fervor of someone who hasn’t yet had his morning Thorazine.
“…(I)t was an exceeding good, pretty letter, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Weston a great deal of pleasure, I remember it was written from Weymouth, and dated Sept. 28th, and began ‘My dear Madam,’ but I forget how it went on; and it was signed ‘F.C. Weston Churchill.’ I remember that perfectly.”
Really, if Frank Churchill had only included a mention of Kitty, a fair but frozen maid, Mr. Woodhouse might just burst like a tomato.
Isabella, tender-hearted thing that she is, can’t help wallowing in the awfulness of Mr. Weston having had to farm out his excellent letter-writing son to rich relations. “To give up one’s child! I really could never think well of any body who proposed such a thing to any body else.” Which sets her husband off on a long delineation of Mr. Weston’s character, which in his opinion is of the easygoing sort that depends more for contentment on a decent meal and a nice game of Yahtzee than upon family attachments. Emma doesn’t like this one bit, “and had half a mind to take it up; but she struggled, and let it pass. She would keep the peace if possible”.
And keeping the peace is basically what she spends the next chapter striving to do, though it turns out she might have set an easier task for herself, like hopping on one foot around the grounds while carrying a piano on her back.
The occasion is the first dinner with the new guests, when Mr. Knightley joins the party. Emma has secured his invitation (Mr. Woodhouse having at first been reluctant to let anyone else share his longed-for pets) because she’s decided that the time has come for them to be friends again. Though her conciliatory nature doesn’t extend all that bloody far:
She thought it time to make up. Making-up, indeed, would not do. She certainly had not been in the wrong, and he would never own that he had. Concession must be out of the question: but it was time to appear to forget that they had ever quarreled; and she hoped it might rather assist the restoration of friendship, that when he came into the room she had one of the children with her,—the youngest, a nice little girl about eight months old, who was making her first visit to Hartfield, and very happy to be danced about in her aunt’s arms.
The crafty vixen. She’s aiming to get back in Knightley’s good graces without stepping anywhere near an apology, and she’s doing it by staging a ravishing tableaux vivant for him to swoon over.
And swoon he does, the big sap, so that amity and accord are restored. But not without a full page of final pokes and jabs and stings, just for the sake of closure. Really, Knightley and Emma are just wonderful together; neither one of them can bear to give the other the last word.
“If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike.”
“To be sure—our discordances must always arise from my being wrong.”
“Yes,” said he, smiling, “and reason good. I was sixteen years old when you were born.”
“A material difference, then,” she replied; “and no doubt you were much my superior in judgment at that period of our lives; but does not the lapse of one-and-twenty years bring our understandings a good deal nearer?”
“Yes, a good deal nearer.”
I could listen this business all the day long.
After the meal “the little party made two natural divisions: on one side (Mr. Woodhouse) and his daughter; on the other the two Mr. Knightleys; their subjects totally distinct, or very rarely mixing, and Emma only occasionally joining in one or the other.”
Emma’s principal job here is to prevent her father and sister’s mutually assured destruction, as they fall into immediate contention over the expertise of their respective physicians. Whatever advice is professed by one, the other’s must be known to abhor.
“Mr. Wingfield most strenuously recommended (South End), sir, or we should not have gone. He recommended it for all the children, but particularly for the weakness in little Bella’s throat,—both sea air and bathing.”
“Ah, my dear, but Perry had many doubts about the sea doing her any good; and as to myself, I have never been perfectly convinced, though perhaps I never told you so before, that the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me once.”
Emma basically has to hover nearby with a fire hose, to turn on them when the volleying gets too heated. This keeps her hopping, because they go at it hammer and tong for pages. And it’s all completely hilarious.
Eventually Isabella’s tender-hearted inquiries after everyone in the village and their wives and children and maiden aunts and dogs and chickens and, God only knows, their head lice probably, leads her to “That sweet, amiable Jane Fairfax!” and for once Emma doesn’t do a “Jane Fairfax! Slllowwwly I turned…” number on hearing her name, because Isabella praising Jane Fairfax is better than Isabella battling Mr. Woodhouse over which of their sawbones has the best remedy for pinkeye.
Isabella says, “I always regret excessively, on dear Emma’s account, that (Jane) cannot be more at Highbury…She would be such a delightful companion for Emma.” Mr. Woodhouse rides to the rescue by saying that Emma has a perfectly wonderful companion these days in Harriet Smith, to which Isabella replies, “I am most happy to hear it; but only Jane Fairfax one knows to be so very accomplished and superior, and exactly Emma’s age.”
So even when Isabella and Mr. Woodhouse are diverted from pitting Mr. Wingfield against Mr. Perry, they can’t help themselves—they take up Jane Fairfax vs. Harriet Smith. I really wish Emma would just let them be, because it’s funny to hear them constantly one-upping (or rather one-lowering) each other, and clearly they both enjoy the hell out of it; it’s possibly the one sport either of them ever gets.
After working up an appetite in their combat, they now join each other in a restorative bowl of “nice, smooth thin gruel”, which they invite Emma to share; she all but jumps out a window in declining in.
The smooth thin gruel does the trick, and catapults Mr. Woodhouse back to attack-dog mode. Before you know it he’s lamenting, “I shall always sorry that you went to the sea this autumn, instead of coming here…And, moreover, if you must go to the sea, it had better not have been to South End. South End is an unhealthy place. Perry was surprised you had fixed upon South End.”
On he goes in this vein, trampling over Isabella’s objections (she’s obviously been too fastidious with her gruel), till finally John Knightley, from across the room, can’t take it anymore, and swivels in his chair to say so.
“Mr. Perry,” said he, in a voice of very strong displeasure, “would do as well to keep his opinion till it is asked for. Why does he make it any business of his to wonder at what I do?—at my taking my family to one part of the coast or another? I may be allowed, I hope, the use of my judgment as well as Mr. Perry. I want his directions no more than his drugs.”
This is exactly the outburst Emma has been turning somersaults to prevent. But it does provide us with an absolutely brilliant punch-line to end the chapter—“Mr. Woodhouse was rather agitated by such harsh reflections on his friend Perry, to whom he had, in fact, though unconsciously, been attributing many of his own feelings and expressions”—so for our part we’re more than willing to forgive Mr. John Knightley his rudeness.
And in fact to ask for more, please.

Emma, chapters 7-9

Mr. Elton has now gone off to London to have Emma’s portrait of Harriet Smith suitably framed—though you get the impression, by the interminable hosannas he keeps heaping on the picture, that for him the only suitable frame would be made of unicorn’s horn dusted with flecks of dandruff from the head of the god Apollo. As irritating as all his fawning and fluttering may be (and it’s very, very irritating), Emma wallows in it, because in her eyes it’s proof that he’s crushing just super hard on Harriet. What other possible explanation can there be? Especially when you’re Emma Woodhouse, and you’ve arranged your whole life so that your first idea about anything is bound to be a hundred-percent slam-dunk?
But then—alas, a complication. Harriet, far waiting for Mr. Elton to return from London to bestow on Emma the framed portrait (and take as payment for his efforts the hand of its subject), comes boomeranging back to Highbury about twenty minutes after having left it, explaining at length (and we’re talking about Harriet here, so “at length” means basically a week and a half) that she’d no sooner got back to Mrs. Goddard’s than she found a letter awaiting her there, from Mr. Robert Martin, proposing that he yoke himself to her and spend the rest of their lives plowing the same furrow. Harriet is predictably surprised and flattered and abashed and uncertain and agog and exhilarated, and that’s just her first six syllables. After she’s finished bashing her way through the gamut of maidenly reactions she turns to Emma and asks “what she should do,” as though needing Emma to issue a direct command, along the lines of “Sit,” “Stay,” or “Heel.”
Emma, however, is so taken aback by Robert Martin’s affrontery (“Upon my word…the young man is determined not to lose any thing for want of asking. He will connect himself well if he can”), doesn’t answer right away, so Harriet urges her to read the letter herself, to help frame her mind. Emma, we’re told, “was not sorry to be pressed”, presumably because it saves her having to snatch the thing out of Harriet’s fingers. And what do you know, she actually finds it to be a well-written piece of work, one that wouldn’t shame a gentleman. “There were not merely no grammatical errors…It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.” So Emma’s left with all her scorn rolling around on her tongue, and no place to put it.
At least, not for long; for she quickly decides that “one of his sisters must have helped him,” and tells Harriet so. But, no—on second (or third?) thought, she admits that “it is not the style of a woman…it is too strong and concise; not diffuse enough for a woman. No doubt he is a sensible man…Vigorous, decided, with sentiments to a certain point, but not coarse. A better written letter, Harriet (returning it to her) than I had expected.”
Harriet is practically jogging in place in anticipation. “Well…well—and—and what shall I do?” Emma—and we can picture her here, being maddeningly matter-of-fact, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt look on her face—says, what, with regard to the letter? “Yes,” says Harriet, climbing the nearest tree and swinging from an overhanging branch. Well of course, Emma says, you must answer it. “But what shall I say?” Harriet begs, now on all fours and gnawing at Emma’s ankle. “Dear Miss Woodhouse, do advise me.”
But Emma’s not having that. “Oh, no, no,” she insists, “the letter had much better be all your own. You will express yourself very properly, I am sure…”
“…There is no danger of your not being intelligible, which is the first thing. Your meaning must be unequivocal: no doubts or demurs; and such expressions of gratitude and concern for the pain you are inflicting as propriety requires, will present themselves unbidden to your mind, I am persuaded. You need not be prompted to write with the appearance of sorrow for his disappointment.”
Harriet, who obviously needs a few sharp thwacks to the forehead to help even the most obvious idea penetrate her skull, says, “You think I ought to refuse him, then?” and Emma is shocked, shockedthat Harriet would ever have thought otherwise. When Harriet had sought her advice, she’d naturally assumed she was asking, not for help in deciding whether to accept, but on how best to phrase a refusal. When Harriet goes all slack-jawed on hearing this, Emma scowls and says, “You mean to return a favorable answer, I collect.”
“No, I do not; that is I do not mean—What shall I do? What would you advise me to do? Pray, dear Miss Woodhouse, tell me what I ought to do?”
“I shall not give you any advice, Harriet. I will have nothing to do with it. This is a point which you must settle with your own feeling…If you prefer Mr. Martin to every other person; if you think him the most agreeable man you have ever been in company with, why should you hesitate? You blush, Harriet. Does any body else occur to you at this moment under such a definition? Harriet, Harriet, do not deceive yourself; do not be run away with by gratitude and compassion. At this moment whom are you thinking of?”
She basically does everything but hold up a flashcard reading ELTON.
Harriet, in these scenes, is basically a lab rat whose behavior Emma is guiding by the strategic application of small electric shocks. This explains the twitching, nervous-tic demeanor she now adopts, as she says, yes, of course, you’re right, “I must do as well as I can by myself; and I have now quite determined, and really almost made up my mind, to refuse Mr. Martin. Do you think I am right?”
Now that her lab rat has turned in the direction Emma wanted, she rewards her with the release of a nice fat edible pellet.
“Perfectly, perfectly right, my dearest Harriet; you are doing just what you ought…It would have grieved me to lose your acquaintance, which must have been the consequence of your marrying Mr. Martin. While you were in the smallest degree wavering, I said nothing about it, because I would not influence; but it would have been the loss of a friend to me. I could not have visited Mrs. Robert Martin, of Abbey-Mill Farm. Now I am secure of you forever.”
That particular danger hadn’t occurred to Harriet (nothing occurs to Harriet that isn’t spelled out for her in large block letters and then dropped on her from a low-flying plane), and her relief is inexpressible. She “would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with (Miss Woodhouse) for any thing in the world.” Not even Mr. Robert Martin’s manly broad shoulders and riveting green eyes. Out of sight, out of mind.
And for this, Emma floods Harriet with even more extravagant praise. “Dear, affectionate creature! You banished to Abbey-Mill Farm! You confined to the society of the illiterate and vulgar all your life! I wonder how the young man could have the assurance to ask it. He must have a pretty good opinion of himself.”
Well, chiquita, you’d know.
Harriet feels compelled to come to Robert Martin’s defense by saying she doesn’t believe he’s conceited…though she has to admit that “since my visiting here I have seen people—and if one comes to compare them, person and manners, there is no comparison at all, oneis so very handsome and agreeable.” Yes, Emma is flashing the ELTON card again; possibly she’s waving it about as though communicating in semaphore.
So suddenly Robert Martin’s ability to write a decent letter doesn’t seem so freakin’ hot. But how, then, to deliver the bad news? What is Harriet to say? What, what, what…? You get the impression that if Emma told her to march up to him, spit on his shoes and then knee him in the groin, Harriet would be off like a shot to do just that. But fortunately Emma advises instead writing to him immediately. She talks Harriet through the whole letter, while insisting that Harriet doesn’t need her help at all; in fact, outside of holding the pen, Harriet’s input is nil. Though looking over Robert’s letter again, for the purposes of answering it, softens her feeling for him so that Emma might have to pluck the pen from her hand and do that job too. Harriet is one of Austen’s most sublimely animal creations; she’s entirely given over to whatever is square in front of her face at any given moment. Her long-term memory can be measured in nanoseconds. You find yourself wondering how on earth she finds her way home every day. Possibly she follows a trail of string laid out for her by Mrs. Goddard.
After the refusal is written, Harriet becomes (for Harriet) reflective, and wonders what her school chum Miss Nash would make of this marriage offer, if she but knew of it, “for Miss Nash thinks her own sister very well married, and it is only to a linen-draper.” Emma just about chokes on her own tongue, and suggests that Harriet’s prospects are much, much superior to any lousy tradesman.
“The attentions of a certain person can hardly be among the tittle-tattle of Highbury yet. Hitherto I fancy you and I are the only people to whom his looks and manners have explained themselves...At this point, perhaps, Mr. Elton is showing your picture to his mother and sisters, telling how much more beautiful is the original, and after being asked for it five or six times, allowing them to hear your name, your own dear name.”
Harriet blushes and giggles, and punches Emma in the arm, and pulls her dress over her head to hide her embarrassment. So far, Emma is playing her like a violin. Or rather like one of those toy balsa-wood guitars made for toddlers, because let’s face it, Harriet’s only got two or three strings to pluck.
Harriet spends the night at Hartfield—and in fact is invited to stay the next several days, because “Emma judged it best in every respect, safest and kindest, to keep her with them as much as possible just at present”, the way you would a dog who you can’t be certain won’t go and wee again on the rug when your back is turned.
While Harriet is off fetching clothes from Mrs. Goddard’s for her stay, Mr. Knightley arrives, and at an awkward moment too because Mr. Woodhouse is just on his way out the door to take a walk about the grounds, something he does for his health at least once a century. But the sight of Mr. Knightley puts him off the idea, and both Emma and Knightley try to persuade him to keep to his original plan, Knightley in particular offering “by his short decided answers, an amusing contrast to the protracted apologies and civil hesitations of the other.” And when Austen says “protracted,” she’s not euphemizing. You might call Mr. Woodhouse one of the author’s epic talkers, only in this instance a better term is epic ditherer.
“Well, I believe, if you will excuse me, Mr. Knightley, if you will not consider me as doing a very rude thing, I shall take Emma’s advice and go out for a quarter of an hour. As the sun is out, I believe I had better take my three turns while I can. I treat you without ceremony, Mr. Knightley. We invalids think we are privileged people…I leave an excellent substitute in my daughter. Emma will be happy to entertain you. And therefore I think I will beg your excuse, and take my three turns—my winter walk.”
And that’s not even the end of it. On he goes, explaining and apologizing, and it just keeps getting funnier and funnier. Many of Austen’s best characters are firecrackers of comic energy; but with Mr. Woodhouse it’s all negative energy—you can sense everyone around him grabbing tightly onto the furniture so they don’t get sucked into his all-consuming void.
When Mr. Woodhouse is finally out the door, Emma and Knightley sit down, and Knightley immediately—and oddly—launches into the subject of Harriet, and speaks “with more voluntary praise than Emma had ever heard before.” She is, he admits, “a pretty little creature, and…in good hands she will turn out a valuable woman.” And his praise isn’t just for Harriet: “(Y)ou have improved her,” he tells Emma. “You have cured her of her school-girl’s giggle; she really does you credit.”
Emma laps this up like cream, and is even more delighted when Knightley says he has “good reason to believe your little friend will soon hear of something to her advantage.” Emma, immediately twigging that this means a proposal (what else could possibly be to Harriet’s advantage? Other than, say, electroshock therapy?), is “more than half in hopes of Mr. Elton’s having dropped a hint” to Knightley about his amorous intentions.
But of course, he’s not talking about Mr. Elton at all. “Robert Martin is the man. Her visit to Abbey-Mill, this summer, seems to have done his business. He is desperately in love and means to marry her.”
“He is very obliging,” Emma shoots back, “but is he sure that Harriet means to marry him?”
Knightley almost laughs at the question. Given Robert Martin’s many sterling qualities, Harriet would have to be a witless dolt to refuse him, a simpleton, a gibbering idiot. Then he pauses, perhaps hearing the words he’s saying, and realizes, Uh-oh.
And in confirmation, Emma wades right in and tells him Robert Martin already did pop the question, and Harriet sent his sorry as a-packin'. Knightley is appalled.
“Harriet Smith refuse Robert Martin? Madness, if it is so; but I hope you are mistaken.”
“I saw her answer; nothing could be clearer.”
“You saw her answer? you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded her to refuse him.”
Royally busted, Emma gets defensive and says even if she did such a thing (which she isn’t saying she did) she wouldn’t be ashamed of it, because after all Robert Martin isn’t Harriet’s equal.
“Not Harriet’s equal!” exclaimed Mr. Knightley, loudly and warmly…”No, he is not her equal, indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation. Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you. What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature, or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin? She is the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all, and certainly no respectable relations. She is known only as a parlour-boarder at a common school. She is not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information…She is pretty, and she is good tempered, and that is all. My only scruple in advising the match was on his account, as being beneath his deserts, and a bad connection for him.”
Way to flame, Big K.
But Emma’s not remotely intimidated. In fact, she loads up her rocket-launcher and fires right back. Robert Martin is “undoubtedly (Harriet’s) inferior as to rank in society. The sphere in which she moves is much above his. It would be a degradation…There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman—and a gentleman of fortune. Her allowance is very liberal; nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort.” Which causes Knightley to remark that it doesn’t matter how rich or noble her father may be, because he’s obviously not in any hurry to introduce her to polite society. No, she’s been “left in Mrs. Goddard’s hands to shift as she can”, which, furthermore, was just fine by her, until Emma got hold of her and started filling her head with ideas that she might secretly be the heir to the throne of Portugal.
“You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma. Robert Martin would never have proceeded so far, if he had not felt persuaded of her not being disinclined to him. I know him well. He has too much real feeling to address any woman on the hap-hazard of selfish passion. And as to conceit, he is the farthest from it of any man I know. Depend upon it, he had encouragement.”
It was most convenient to Emma not to make a direct reply to this assertion; she chose rather to take up her own line of the subject again.
Clearly Emma has had media training. She could easily run for high office.
Instead she changes tack, arguing that Harriet is by Knightley’s own admission very pretty, “and till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed; till they do fall in love with well-formed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness Harriet,” is going to be able to pick and choose from among a field of suitors. “I am very much mistaken,” she winds up, going for an epic smack-down, “if your sex in general would not think such beauty, and such temper, the highest claims a woman could possess.” But then she overplays her hand:
“Were you, yourself, ever to marry, she is the very woman for you.”
And down in the kitchen, the gods of foreshadowing suddenly drop all the copper pots at once, and kick the dog so that it howls. But Emma barely notices, because she’s holding her ground against Knightley’s next full-frontal assault.
“You will puff her up with such ideas of her own beauty…that in a little while, nobody within reach will be good enough for her…Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives…and most prudent men would be afraid of the inconvenience and disgrace they might be involved in, when the mystery of her parentage is revealed. Let her marry Robert Martin, and she is safe, respectable, and happy forever...”
In fact, Robert Martin is exactly the man to keep Harriet happy. It wouldn’t be materially different a task from keeping his chickens happy.
But Emma won’t see it, she’s determined to paint Robert Martin as the lowest of the low, deficient in appearance, education, manners, and for all we know hygiene, geometry, and Morris dancing. Whereas Knightley insists that by any objective standard Robert Martin’s character and talents make him as superior to Harriet as is Seabiscuit to a pack mule.
By this time they’re really just talking at instead of to each other, and Emma tries “to look cheerfully unconcerned, but was really feeling uncomfortable, and wanting him very much to be gone.” This is when we like Emma best: when she’s forced to deal with someone who doesn’t play by her rules, who won’t read the lines she’s written for him in her ongoing A&E miniseries The Life of Emma Woodhouse. And so far, Mr. Knightley is the only such holdout (don’t worry, others will follow). We love watching her squirm beneath his opprobrium, especially because he knows her so very well.
In fact, he now even twigs to the fish Emma’s really trying to catch for Harriet, and warns her, “(I)f Elton is the man, I think it will be all labour in vain.” Emma tries to laugh it off, but he mercilessly zeroes in: “Elton may talk sentimentally but he will act rationally. He is as well acquainted with his own claims as you can be with Harriet’s…I am convinced that he does not mean to throw himself away.”
Emma pretends that the idea of pairing Elton with Harriet is the furthest thing from her mind and how delightfully daffy of Knightley to think otherwise, he’s obviously been out in the sun too long or possibly hit his head on a low-lying beam. No, she wants only to keep Harriet to herself for a while, like a little pet spider monkey she knows she must eventually return to the wild.
Knightley, not at all fooled, leaps to his feet and says, “Good morning to you,” then turns on his heel and walks abruptly out, leaving Emma with about three or four really beautifully shaped retorts still poised on her lips. This kind of departure, in Austen-land, is about as disdainful as it gets. He may as well have snapped his fingers in her face, then kicked over his chair as he one-eightied. As a result, Emma is left “in a state of vexation” that’s intermingled with tiresome strains of very inconvenient self-doubt.
In my reading of Pride and Prejudice,I talked about how the lightning-swift, diamond-sharp exchanges between Lizzie and Mr. Darcy prefigured—in fact helped popularize and institutionalize—the kind of repartee we now recognize as the cornerstone of romantic comedy. One of the genre’s many conceits is that the more a man and a woman bicker and abuse each other at the beginning of the story, the more certain it is they’ll be happily canoodling by the end. I’m not saying this with complete approval; the genre is not a favorite of mine, with the usual exceptions-that-prove-the-rule (say, Tracy and Hepburn in Pat and Mike). But Austen is its champion, and the sparks that fly between Emma and Knightley are sparks indeed—meaning they’re both incandescent and incendiary; they delight the ear, but might set fire to the hair. Of course we know the two combatants are destined for each other, but there’s nothing cozy about their path there; it’s a cage match, with repartee as the weapon of choice.
Emma, rendered all itchy by her three rounds with Mr. Knightley, is now further discomfited by the fact that Harriet still hasn’t returned from Mrs. Goddard’s. She fears she might have run into Robert Martin there; because, Harriet being Harriet, fifteen minutes in Robert’s company is more than sufficient for her to lapse into a state of “Emma who?” and accept Robert’s proposal and possibly even register for gifts at the local Farm & Fleet. She’s especially anxious because her goal now is not only to see Harriet married to Mr. Elton for her own sake, but also (and possibly more importantly) to score a point off Mr. Knightley, who’s just declared such a match completely impossible. Emma is certain—certain, you hear—that Knightley has merely projected his own ideas of Mr. Elton’s character onto his friend; if he could only have seen him simpering and sighing and frolicking around Harriet throwing rose petals in the air, wouldn’t he have a different opinion then.
Fortunately for Emma, Harriet arrives back at Highbury babbling not of Mr. Martin but of Mr. Elton, who, through some interminable chain of servant gossip that Harriet details with all the relish of a South Sea islands anthropologist, is now known to have incurred the scorn of his whist club by walking out on a game to attend to a “very particular”errand “which he would not put off for any inducement in the world; and something about a very enviable commission, and being the bearer or something exceedingly precious.” And when charged by a fellow member that, by his speaking in such a fa-la-la manner in that den of masculine privilege, there must be a lady involved, Elton “only looked very conscious and smiling, and rode off in great spirits.” And all the servants in the gossip chain agree that whoever the lady might be is in fact the luckiest lady in the world, because “Mr. Elton had not his equal for beauty or agreeableness,” so that Harriet is reduced to blushing and giggling and climbing on top of the couch and burying her head under the pillows like an ostrich.
Eventually Mr. Elton, his very particularerrand concluded, returns in triumph with the framed portrait, which is hung over the mantelpiece of the sitting room. He languishes beneath it, sighing and fluttering his eyelids and just generally making sure anyone who enters the room won’t be half so impressed by the perfection of the portrait as by his perfect adoration of it. As for Harriet’s feelings, “they were visibly forming themselves into as strong an attachment as her youth and sort of mind admitted,” which is one of Austen’s more subtle snipes.
Now that Harriet's on the path to respectable matrimony, Emma tries to enlarge her mind by drawing her into a program of study, which is about as successful as you’d think it would be; you might as well try to teach a puppy how to sew. “It was much easier to chat than to study; much pleasanter to let her imagination range and work at Harriet’s fortune, than to be labouring to enlarge her comprehension, or exercise it on sober facts”. The only slightly literary endeavor they manage to stick with is collecting riddles in “a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper…ornamented with ciphers and trophies.” Scrapbooking, basically.
These riddles are just the kind of thing Emma completely grooves on, because as whip-smart as she is, she solves them in just seconds flat. (Harriet is completely hopeless; they might as well be written in Urdu. But I can’t be too hard on her, as they pretty much zip right over my head too.) But since Emma’s so very good at them, she runs through them like a bag of tortilla chips, and soon has to put out the word to friends and family that she needs more, more, more of them to feed her voracious habit.
Her father is keen to help, being “almost as much interested in the business as the girls, and tried very often to recollect something worth putting in”, but “it always ended in ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.’” So it’s up to Mr. Elton to come charging to the rescue, his arms overflowing, all bright-eyed and grinning and riddles, riddles, did my lady ask for riddles? (I generally avoid the spate of modern-day Jane Austen “sequels,” but if there’s one in which Mr. Elton is savagely eviscerated by wolves, I would read that.)
Unfortunately, Emma has already transcribed most of the riddles he’s brought her, so she asks, “Why will you not write one yourself for us, Mr. Elton?” And then, oh boy, are we off to the races. Because Mr. Elton supplies a big’un, and Emma and Harriet (well, Emma with Harriet looking on) strive for several pages to solve it, only to discover at the end that it was composed with intent. Here it is:
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,Lords of the earth! Their luxury and ease,Another view of man, my second brings,Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But ah! united, what reverse we have!Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown;Lord of the earth and see, he bends a slave,And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
They ready wit the word will soon supply,May its approval beam in that soft eye!
The ready wit in question of course finally cracks it: “My first” is court; “my second” is ship; and “But ah! united” is courtship.
Yes, Mr. Elton is flirting through riddles.
Now, I’m well aware that some people turn to Jane Austen because modernity is simply too coarse for them, and their preferred escape is to a literary world in which a complex code of manners and behavior provides a filter through which strong emotions are rendered all nice and tidy and scrapbook-ready. And while in my opinion Austen’s great achievement is to show us, relentlessly and hilariously, that this code isn’t even close to being up to the task—still, I get it. I appreciate the impulse, and the epidemic of 21st century crudeness that triggers it.
But man, these riddles. What can I tell you, after just a couple pages of them, I really just wish someone had invented sexting, already.
Anyway, Emma couldn’t be surer of her instincts now, and is probably in her mind already dancing the tarantella on Mr. Knightley’s shattered pride. She tells Harriet that this riddle is proof positive that she’s ensnared her man, and ensured herself a match “which offers nothing but good…it will fix you in the centre of all your real friends, close to Hartfield and to me, and confirm our intimacy for ever. This, Harriet, is an alliance which can never raise a blush in either of us.” As I’ve said, Emma’s most likable when she’s blushing, so it’s really just as well that she’s so spectacularly wrong here.
Harriet, of course, is in a disbelieving dither at her good fortune, and keeps asking Emma for confirmation that it’s all really happening. In that respect, she’s actually cannier than Emma herself, because to her it just doesn’t seem entirely probable, or even possible. Or hell, even sane. But Harriet is the kind of girl who will repeatedly stick her hand into a flame as long as you reassured her each time, “Okay, now it won’t hurt.”
Yet Emma is the one who’s actually delusional. Comparing Harriet and Mr. Elton to Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston, she practically purrs in contemplation of her powers. “Your marrying will be equal to the match at Randalls,” she says. “There does seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love exactly the right direction, and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow.” By “something in the air of Hartfield,” she of course means, “me.”
Harriet chatters on about Elton for several pages, all in the line of, “Imagine him choosing me—me of all people—no, imagine it, really—honestly, just imagine it.” She recalls the first time she met him, when “the two Abbots and I ran into the front room and peeped through the blind when we heard he was going by, and Miss Nash came and scolded us away, and staid to look through herself,” and now imagine it, she’s going to marry him! Eventually she spirals back to his soul-revealing riddle, and pauses to laud it in a manner that takes a sideswipe at poor old plebian Robert Martin.
“It is one thing…to have very good sense in a common way, like every body else, and if there is any thing to say, to sit down and write a letter, and say just what you must, in a short way; and another, to write verses and charades like this.”
Emma is so pleased by this correct response that she tosses Harriet a fish, and Harriet claps her fins and does it again for more. Then she jumps through a hoop and plays “Auld Lang Syne” on a pair of squeeze-horns.
But there’s a problem: now that the riddle has been copied into Emma’s book, how to return it to Mr. Elton? Should Harriet let him know his sweet funky lovin’ is out of the bag? And if so how should she say it, where should she stand, what should she wear, should she be demure or bold or maybe just grab his sleeve with her teeth and not let go? Emma bestows the advice she always gives, to everyone and in every situation: “Leave it to me. You do nothing…”
“…He will be back here this evening, I dare say, and then I will give it him back, and some nonsense or other will pass between us and you shall not be committed. Your soft eyes shall choose their own time for beaming. Trust to me.”
Of course Harriet trusts her. No golden retriever was ever more ardently loyal. Except for one brief moment, when Emma hears her father coming in and asks Harriet for permission to read the riddle to him. “He loves any thing of the sort, and especially any thing that pays a woman a compliment.” Harriet balks, and Emma has to bring her round by saying that if Mr. Elton “had been anxious for secrecy, he would not have left the paper while I was by; but he rather pushed it towards me than towards you.”
Harriet hears her; unfortunately, she doesn’t remotely hear herself. You want to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Rerun that last bit a few times, sweetheart. Anything pop out at you?”
Anyway, the riddle does end up delighting Mr. Woodhouse, though he makes no attempt to solve it, choosing instead to once again dredge up “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid”. In fact, it’s almost become his catchphrase. I keep envisioning a vaudeville routine: Mr. Woodhouse doddering onto a stage and clearing his throat, then declaiming, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” and immediately getting a pie in the face. It could play two shows a day and three on weekends and never not be funny.
The name “Kitty” reminds Mr. Woodhouse of his elder daughter, Isabella, because “she was very near being christened Catherine after her grand-mamma”—yes, this is how his mind works—and thinking of Isabella happily reminds him that she and her husband (Mr. Knightley’s elder brother, remember) will be visiting soon, though he hates to think how shocked she’ll be not to find Miss Taylor here. Even worse, she’s staying only a week, then that horrid man will take her back out into the brutal world. “I think, Emma, I shall try and persuade her to stay longer with us. She and the children might stay very well.” Also, I’m pretty sure he’s considering how if he cuts them up and hides the parts under the floorboards of different rooms, they won’t be able to leave at all.
As if to lend weight to this theory, he says, speaking of his grandchildren, “They will come and stand by my chair and say, ‘Grandpapa, can you give me a bit of string?’ and once Henry asked me for a knife, but I told him knives were only made for grandpapas.”
And yet a sentence later he’s complaining that their father’s too rough with them, and then laments the way their uncle “tosses them up to the ceiling in a very frightful way.” Well…I suppose it’s only kinetic violence Mr. Woodhouse disapproves him. I can easily imagine him slowly smothering the life out of his nearest and dearest. Afterwards they’d all be so wonderfully quiet and finally stop that awful dashing off hither and yon.
Later in the morning Mr. Elton drops by—Harriet girlishly turns away at the sight of him, which is probably just as well as she’s undoubtedly gone all goggle-eyed and pendulum-tongued—and Emma’s “quick eye soon discerned in his the consciousness of having made a push—of having thrown a die; and she imagined he was come to see how it might turn up.”
This is the kind of game Emma likes to play most of all, without realizing what an amazing cock-up she is at it. She hurls herself in now, guns blazing and eyelashes batting, and returns the riddle and thanks him for it. “We admired it so much, that I have ventured to write it into Miss Smith’s collection…Of course I have not transcribed beyond the eight first lines”—the final two being, of course, too revealing of the author’s percolating testosterone.
Mr. Elton is a little confused at first, but rises to the occasion and undertakes some banter with Emma, rife with hidden meanings, and then grandly departs—while Harriet has remained the entire time with her face to the wall, biting her fingernails and making clubbed-baby-seal noises.
As for his departure, “Emma could not think it too soon; for with all his good and agreeable qualities there was a sort of parade in his speeches which was very apt to incline her to laugh.” Laugh at him while you can, chiquita. Because as we’ll soon see, the joke is oh so very on you.

Demon commerce

Such is the life of a freelance writer, that unless we've got a sugar-daddy client who keeps us solvent all year 'round, we're unfortunately unable to turn down any paying projects that come our way. And I was recently offered two big ones—big enough that I should not in good conscience have accepted both, but I convinced myself I could handle the workload if I just gutted my schedule of unnecessary distractions, like nutrition and hygiene. "I'll eat in June," I told myself.


Alas, in such a situation this blog has had to take a back seat for a while; but please rest assured that I am committed to it, and to you, and that this hiatus will be of no longer duration than is absolutely necessary.


I just wish this blog were my sugar-daddy client, and that thousands of people were daily purchasing the trade paperback collection or downloading the ebook ...but as long as I remain a cult attraction for a handful of cognoscenti, this blog will be a luxury... though much loved, as luxuries usually are. (Translation: Tell your friends, already!)


Until next time... keep it chill, homies.

Emma, chapters 4-6

We return to Hartfield to find Harriet Smith not only a regular visitor to the house, but totally BFF's with Emma. Though what Emma requires of a friend is maybe a tad different from you and me.

As a walking companion…Emma had very early foreseen how useful she might find [Harriet]. In that respect Mrs. Weston's loss had been important…since Mrs. Weston's marriage her exercise had been too much confined. She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges.
In Austen-land, the standard for perfection is set by Lizzy Bennet, who, as you'll recall, was an enthusiastic—in fact a relentless—walker, and so far from being unhappy to walk alone, seemed actively to prefer it. So Austen is clearly inviting us to judge Emma here; this girl's ego is so big, she can't stroll half a mile on her own ("it was not pleasant") without someone trotting along behind her to listen to all her idle thoughts, and to coo and gasp and applaud and fill up the distance from point A to point B with continual affirmations of Emma Woodhouse's complete and total genius. And Harriet Smith, being "totally free from conceit; and only desiring to be guided by any one she looked up to", is just the gal for the job. You could put a collar on her and throw sticks for her to fetch, and keep her busy for the better part of the day.
Though from Emma's skewed point of view, Harriet is the one who's benefiting from the friendship. She means to be "useful" to Harriet—in the way Christian missionaries were useful to happy, guilt-free, self-reliant Pacific islanders—and her "first attempts at usefulness were in an endeavour to find out who were the parents; but Harriet could not tell." Emma is completely vexed by Harriet's inability to satisfy her desire to know what isn't even remotely her business anyway. She "could never believe that in the same situation she should not have discovered the truth. Harriet had no penetration. She had been satisfied to hear and believe just what Mrs. Goddard chose to tell her; and looked no farther." Just what Emma would have done differently under those circumstances she doesn't say; maybe get Mrs. Goddard in a chokehold and refuse to let go till she divulged?...Or engage in some Haley Mills-style breaking into the school's office after lights-out and rifle through Mrs. Goddard's desk, while a pliant and easily spooked schoolmate (Harriet again) nervously stood watch?
Thwarted in her attempts to suss out her new friends origins, Emma means at least to break off Harriet's intimacy with the Martins, the lowly farming family who are her only friends outside the school…excepting, of course, now Emma. Not that Emma's a snob, exactly; in fact at first she actually encourages Harriet to tell her about the Martins, "amused by such a picture of another set of beings"; she enjoys hearing of their "eight cows, two of them Alderneys, and one a very pretty little Welsh cow, indeed; and of Mrs. Martin's saying, as she was so fond of it, it should be called her cow".  This is all Jules Verne to Emma; if Harriet were to speak of hoeing the chickens and milking the cat, Emma wouldn't blink.
But she quickly changes her mind when she learns that the household—which she had believed to comprise "a mother and daughter, a son and son's wife," are in fact entirely short on the latter; which means that pretty, tail-wagging, eager-to-please Harriet has been lurking in the vicinity of a hot-blooded single fella. Suddenly on red alert, Emma prods Harriet on the subject of Robert Martin, which unleashes a torrent of gushy, girlish anecdote, some of it alarmingly courtly—"He had his shepherd's son into the parlour one night on purpose to sing to her", for instance; which, let me just give props to the guy, is a totally smooth move and would probably work even today. If you could find a shepherd's son. Or a parlour.
Her suspicions confirmed, Emma now switches to another line of questioning—all phrased with such particularity that you can almost see the grimace on her face, as though she's trying to dislodge something caught in her back teeth. For instance: "Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business. He does not read?" Fortunately, Harriet is impervious to subtlety of any kind, and responds by enthusiastically listing everything Robert has ever read, from the Agricultural Reports to "some other books that lie in one of the window seats—but he reads all them to himself," which I'm sorry, just makes me think Robert retires to that window seat on the pretense of reading, then curls up for a good, long snooze. In a house brimming with all those women, could you blame him?
When Emma asks "What sort of looking man is Mr. Martin?", Harriet begins to explain (not a hottie, it turns out; but the kind whose appearance improves the more you know him), then asks Emma, "But did you never see him?" Because of course it would be incredible if she hadn't, there being only twenty-three people in all of Highbury. Emma draws herself up, Lady Bracknell style, and says:
"…I may have seen him fifty times, but without any idea of his name. A young farmer, whether on horseback or on foot, is the very last sort of person to raise my curiosity. The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice, as in every other he is below it."
Right, then. We love us some haughty Emma, but when it comes to it, we won't be entirely sorry to see her with egg on her face. A fully-loaded bacon-and-three-cheese omelet, even.
When Emma asks how old Robert Martin is, Harriet says, "He was four-and-twenty the 8th of last June, and my birthday is the 23d; just a fortnight and a day's difference; which is very odd." These are the kind of lovely little flourishes that reveal Austen's genius,; because of course a fifteen-day difference in birthdays isn't remarkable at all; it would only seem so to someone who's utterly smitten. We see this; and possibly Emma does too, because she now declares him far too young to marry.
"Six years hence, if he could meet with a good sort of young woman in the same rank as his own, and with a little money, it might be very desirable."
"Six years hence! dear Miss Woodhouse, he would be thirty years old."
""Well, and that is as early as most men can afford to marry, who are not born to an independence."
Emma's about as subtle as a pile-driver in this scene; fortunately, she's talking to Harriet, who's so naïve you could chain her to a radiator for two solid years before she would infer any ill intent. I mean, just listen to the absolutely shameless way Emma goes on from here; a slightly sharper-than-average gibbon would twig to what she's trying to do.
"I wish you may not get into a scrape, Harriet, whenever he does marry.—I mean, as to being acquainted with his wife; for though his sisters, from a superior education, are not to be altogether objected to, it does not follow that he might marry any body at all fit for you to notice…There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman's daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you."
Harriet flutters and clucks and curtseys and rolls over on her back, so grateful is she for Emma's patronage; but Emma tells her, "I would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be independent even of Hartfield and Miss Woodhouse," and let's give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe at that moment she actually, honestly believes what she's saying; but of course she is who she is, and her real motive is to be able to go through life pointing out Harriet at dinner parties and boasting "I made her"—just before pointing to Mr. and Mrs. Weston and nodding, "Them, too."
Emma gets a chance to judge how well the seeds she's planted have taken root, because the next day she and Harriet run into Robert Martin in the flesh.  Emma—who stands aside during the encounter (because Robert isn't fit to be introduced to her)—observes him, and finds him presentable enough, but "when he came to be contrasted with gentlemen, she thought he must lose all the ground he had gained in Harriet's inclination. Harriet was not insensible of manner…Mr. Martin looked as if he did not know what manner was."
Accordingly, when they part, Emma wastes not a moment in quashing the little tizzy of happiness Harriet has taken away from the encounter, by hammering it hard with a great big gentleman-shaped cudgel.
"He is very plain, undoubtedly, remarkably plain; but that is nothing, compared with his entire want of gentility. I had no right to expect much, and I did not expect much; but I had no idea that he could be so very clownish, so totally without air. I had imagined him, I confess, a degree or two nearer gentility…At Hartfield, you have had very good specimens of well educated, well bred men. I should be surprised if, after seeing them, you could be in company with Mr. Martin again without perceiving him to be a very inferior creature,—and rather wondering at yourself for having thought him agreeable at all."
Harriet immediately acquiesces—if she had a tail, she'd tuck it between her bloomers—and says yes, of course, you're right, I'm so stupid, I'm an idiot, and Emma just keeps banging away, relentlessly, asking Harriet only to consider Robert Martin next to gentlemen like, for instance, purely chosen at random, Mr. Weston and Mr. Elton. When Harriet basically gags at the idea of Mr. Weston, who is just so totally ancient (being, ahem, "between forty and fifty"—thanks a lot there, Harriet), Emma admonishes her by asking her to consider what Robert Martin will be like at the same age: "a completely gross, vulgar farmer,—totally inattentive to appearances, and thinking of nothing but profit and loss."
But then, having defended his honor, Emma sets Mr. Weston aside to focus on Mr. Elton, which has been her plan all along. She bends Harriet's ear about what a sweet, sweet piece of superfine he is:
"…I think a young man might be very safely recommended to take Mr. Elton as a model. Mr. Elton is good humored, cheerful, obliging, and gentle. He seems to me to be grown particularly gentle of late. I do not know whether he had any design of ingratiating himself with either of us, Harriet, by additional softness, but it strikes me that his manners are softer than they used to be. If he means any thing, it must be to please you."
And with that, she's off to the races. She can practically smell the flowers strewn about the nuptial altar, already. And she's congratulating herself for having put it all together, especially because Mr. Elton is that rarest of creatures, being "quite the gentleman himself and without low connections; at the same time not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet." Emma's only worry is that the match is so obviously a perfect one that it no one will give her "much merit in planning it," which of course is the real motivation for the whole shebang. But she hopes the sheer speed with which she lashes the young couple together for life will earn her an extra credit or two; and she doesn't doubt Harriet will fall right in line with what's expected of her, for "a girl who could be gratified by Robert Martin's riding about the country to get walnuts for her might very well be conquered by Mr. Elton's admiration."
All of Jane Austen's early novels are to some degree about class—certainly more so than about romance—and we've become accustomed to seeing her heroines struggle against the barriers that their unspectacular births have set for them. So it's a bit of a shock, in this novel, suddenly to see an Austen heroine on the other side of that struggle, in the role usually reserved for the likes of Caroline Bingley or Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Emma's snobbishness, and her virtual brutality towards Harriet and Robert Martin, seem at first to be ameliorated by good intentions; by being inspired by a desire to help Harriet improve her lot in life. (Women could leap up a class ranking or two by means of marriage; unlike men, who were basically stuck. Occasionally an industrious man might pull himself out of what Emma calls the "yeomanry" by making a fortune, but that didn't land him in the gentry—it landed him in the brand-new merchant class, which to the gentry was just the same pigs in a different pen.)
But Emma's presumed kindness to Harriet is, as we have seen, more selfishly motivated than not. And Emma dipping below the class barrier to befriend Harriet isn't so beneficent a character trait as it might seem, because if she didn't stoop so low, she'd have pretty much no one to hang out with at all. It's not like Highbury is crawling with debutantes. Emma's endeavors on Harriet's behalf are designed to manufacture, from raw materials, a friend worthy of the great Miss Woodhouse; one whom Miss Woodhouse may also then have the satisfaction of displaying as her own creation, a là Henry Higgins (or, for that matter, Victor Frankenstein).
What follows now is a scene remarkable for Austen; it's a chapter devoted entirely to a conversation between Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston. Only rarely does Austen tack away from her protagonist's point of view to give us a slice of narrative from someone else's perspective; in Pride and Prejudice she occasionally cuts away to Darcy and the Bingley siblings at Netherfield, and in Mansfield Park she teases us with an occasional private bout of banter between Henry and Mary Crawford. What makes the present instance so surprising is that it occurs so early in the narrative; we're only four chapters in, and Austen's already abandoning her titular heroine so that other voices can have their say. Clearly she's feeling her powers—flexing her muscles and extending her reach.
But while Emma may not be present in the flesh, she looms large in Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston's thoughts. Knightley has sought out the former governess to bitch about Emma's sudden friendship with Harriet Smith; he maintains that "neither of them will do the other any good." Mrs. Weston disagrees, and warns him, "This will certainly be the beginning of one of our quarrels about Emma", which tantalizes us with evidence that there have been others…going back how far, we can only wonder. (Given that it's Emma, infancy wouldn't strain our credulity.)
Mrs. Weston argues that the two girls will do each other good, accusing Knightley of objecting to Harriet for not being "the superior young woman which Emma's friend ought to be. But, on the other hand, as Emma wants to see her better informed, it will be an inducement to her to read more herself. They will read together." Knightley scoffs at this.
"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule."
In other words, the road to hell is paved by Emma Woodhouse. Or by her lists, anyway, whether alphabetical or otherwise. Knightley goes on to say that "Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was always quick and assured", and the implication here is that she's so clever she outwits even herself. Emma can talk herself into believing anything she wishes, and can persuade herself that anything she desires, she ought to have. She is, in short, a total Heather.
Mrs. Weston takes this criticism a tad personally, because (ahem) until recently she was in charge of both Emma's reading and Emma's character. She tells Knightley she's glad she didn't have to leave Hartfield for another post and rely on him for a reference, because he clearly thinks she blew chunks as Emma's governess. Knightley backpedals, but without quite bothering denying it.
"You are better placed here, very fit for a wife, but not at all for a governess. But you were preparing yourself to be an excellent wife all the time you were at Hartfield…you were receiving a very good education from [Emma], on the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid…"
Mrs. Weston points out that obedience and submission aren't exactly skills she requires as the wife of her easygoing, what's-for-dinner-that-sounds-perfect husband; but she thanks Knightley for the compliment anyway, though we can guess she privately would like to give him a gentle shove out the sitting-room window.
Knightley—who's on quite a tear, here—then lays into Harriet, calling her "the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have", given that she "knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways…How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?" He adds for good measure that Emma's company will likewise ruin Harriet, because she "will grow just refined enough to be uncomfortable with those among whom birth and circumstance have placed her home", which makes me suspect that Knightley has cheated by reading ahead.
Somehow Mrs. Weston manages to steer the conversation onto Emma's looks, which is one area where she and Knightley can agree, and they spend a few paragraphs going all moony over how luscious and creamy and delicious she is, to the point that it starts to feel just a hair creepy ("oh, what a bloom of full health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure. There is health, not merely in her bloom, but in her air, her head, her glance"). But finally Knightley, who must be having some kind of gastric trouble today, manages to swing the topic back around to something he can bitch about.
"I think her all you describe. I love to look at her; and I will add this praise, that I do not think her personally vain. Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way."
Aaaaand then it's back to the races, with more Harriet Smith bashing and general This-will-not-end-well spouting. Eventually he and Mrs. Weston agree to a truce, which Knightley caps by sighing, "I wonder what will become of her," then adding:
"She always declares she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all. But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for. It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object. I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good."
Ah, but what about in love and with every indication of a return?...As we'll soon find out, Mr. Knightley won't be quite as sanguine about that, and will be driven to fuming and snorting and stamping his great big foot on the carpet. Because…? Well, we know why, and so does Mrs. Weston, who acknowledges his little outburst while taking care to "conceal some favorite thoughts of her own and Mr. Weston's on the subject as much as possible".
And on that note, we check back in on Emma, who's pretty content with her own favorite thoughts on the subject of Mr. Elton and Harriet Smith. She's been drawing the two together, and is now "quite convinced of Mr. Elton's being in the fairest way of falling in love, if not in love already." Her evidence? "He talked of Harriet; and praised her so warmly"—but hold on, let's just hear a little bit of that warmth and ardor, shall we?
"You have given Miss Smith all that she required," said he: "you have made her graceful and easy. She was a beautiful creature when she came to you; but in my opinion, the attractions you have added are infinitely superior to what she received from nature."
"I am glad you think I have been of useful to her; but Harriet only wanted drawing out…I have, perhaps, given her a little more decision of character,—which taught her to think on points which had not been in her way before."
"Exactly so; that is what principally strikes me. So much superadded decision of character! Skilful has been the hand."
Not being idiots, we can immediately see that Mr. Elton is falling all over himself to compliment Emma and her influence, not Harriet and her improvement. And when he reiterates his praise, "with a sort of sighing animation which had a vast deal of the lover," Emma just takes it for granted that the object of the sighs is Harriet. So Mr. Knightley is correct, and she isn't vain about her own beauty; but her vanity is on titanic display here all the same—because she's just blithely presuming that the various human beings around her will easily bend and twist themselves to her will.
Emma continues what she considers a flirtation by proxy with Mr. Elton—unaware that he considers it a flirtation front-and-center—by saying how much she'd like to have a good picture of Harriet in all her improvement. "I would give any money for it. I almost long to attempt her likeness myself." Which is all Mr. Elton has to hear before he's down on one knee entreating her to please, please, oh pretty-pretty-super-please take on the project. "I know what your drawings are. How could you suppose me ignorant? Is not this room rich in specimens of your landscapes and flowers? and has not Mrs. Weston some inimitable figure-pieces in her drawing-room at Randalls?" Emma allows the compliment, but wonders "what has all that to do with taking likenesses?" Really, a blow to the back of her head couldn't make her any stupider than she is right here.
Mr. Elton dances around her some more, beseeching her in the kind of fawning language that makes Mr. Collins's spectacular ass-kissing of Lady Catherine de Bourgh sound almost half-hearted. Emma rewards him by fetching her old portfolio, which contains all her previous attempts at portraiture, before she let the habit lapse—the way, we're told, she's let every serious attempt at mastering any accomplishment wither away. "She played and sang, and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting…She was not much deceived as to her own skill, either as an artist or a musician; but she was not unwilling to have others deceived," as witness how she clearly doesn't mind Mr. Elton's gasps of admiration now.
"There was merit in every drawing," Austen concedes—adding pointedly, "in the least finished, perhaps the most." Yet Emma spends an entire page taking Mr. Elton through every single likeness, elaborately explaining whose it is and how she came to do it and why she ultimately gave it up and what the weather was that day and what shoes she had on and when she broke for tea and whether she had biscuits or cake, and Mr. Elton can scarcely draw a breath, so spellbound is by the entire narration. Emma could conclude by setting the whole portfolio on fire and beating him about the shoulders with it, and his raptures wouldn't diminish one bit.
Finally—as if there were any doubt—Emma decides to end her long abandonment of the painter's muse and take up her brushes again. "[For] Harriet's sake, or rather for my own, and as there are no husbands and wives in the case at present, I will break my resolution now." Mr. Elton latches onto that "No husbands and wives in the case at present" bit and repeats it just often enough, and with enough implied meaning, to make Emma go all smug about her mutant matchmaking powers again.
Before long she's sketching away, with Harriet posing before her "smiling and blushing", and with Mr. Elton hovering over her shoulder and letting out little chirps and twitters of delight. Emma "gave him credit for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again [at Harriet] without offense; but was really obliged to put an end to it, and request him to place himself elsewhere." When the picture is finally finished and presented to the family, "Mr. Elton was in continual raptures, and defended it through every criticism"—as when Mr. Knightley dares to suggest that Emma has made Harriet too tall.
"Oh, no—certainly not too tall—not in the least too tall. Consider she is sitting down, which naturally presents a different—which in short gives exactly the idea;—and the proportions must be preserved, you know. Proportions, fore-shortening:—oh no; it gives one exactly the idea of such a height as Miss Smith's;—exactly so indeed."
Perhaps sensing that his role as the novel's resident one-note gasbag is being usurped, Mr. Woodhouse interjects that while he likes the picture, Harriet "seems to be sitting out doors with only a little shawl over her shoulders; and it makes one think she must catch a cold."
"But, my dear papa, it is supposed to be summer; a warm day in summer. Look at the tree."
"But it is never safe to sit out of doors, my dear."
At which Mr. Elton vaults back into the fray, proclaiming "the placing Miss Smith out of doors, and the tree is touched with such inimitable spirit! Any other situation would have been much less in character", and yadda yadda yadda until Emma must feel tempted to go fetch her paintbox and revise the whole background with a good thick blanket of snow.
The next item of business is to have the thing framed, and only a London framer will do, and only Mr. Elton is to be considered, at his own insistence, for the near-sacred duty of taking possession of the canvas and escorting it to town and seeing it done, to the point at which he really seems "fearful of not being incommoded enough."
"What a precious deposit!" said he, with a tender sigh, as he received it.
At which point even Emma has to roll her eyes. "This man is almost too gallant to be in love," she thinks. In fact, she's not a big fan of his; "he does sigh and languish, and study for compliments rather more than I could endure as a principal." No, in fact, if she were the object of all his gushy moistness, she'd have to roll up a newspaper and swat him repeatedly on the nose with it. But for Harriet's sake, she'll put up with anything.
Anything, that is, except Harriet deciding for herself who she is and whom to love. And frankly, that's a lesson it's going to take more than the coming Mr. Elton meltdown to drive home.

Emma, chapters 1-3

Jane Austen's fourth novel, Emma, is arguably as beloved as her second, Pride and Prejudice; in fact Austenites will often define themselves by which one they prefer, even a bit contentiously, which is sort of like taking sides over which champagne you like better, brut or demi-sec. For my part, I don't care, just top off my glass, please.

In each of Austen's novels we find her trying to achieve something new, and in Emma it's to do with her heroine. Having just given us (to disastrous effect, I think) a protagonist so passive and repressed as to render her utterly inert, she swings to the opposite extreme here. Emma Woodhouse is everything Mansifeld Park's Fanny Price is not: rich, beautiful, spoiled, self-confident. She has character flaws you could steer an oil tanker through, but her rank makes her virtually unassailable; as a result of which she's a charming, beguiling, utterly relentless terror. The novel is about her metamorphosis into a human being. I'm reminded of the story of Greta Garbo at a screening of Beauty and the Beast, reacting to the hero's climactic transformation into a prince by exclaiming, "Give me back my beast!" Readers of Emma may feel similarly when our pushy, tart-tongued heroine is finally brought down a peg or seven, and learns to play nice. But it's only a small vexation, because the solution is obvious: just go back to page one read the whole damn thing over again.
Emma begins with the entrancing plangency of a folk tale by the brothers Grimm, as Austen lays out the particulars of our heroine's biography: mistress of a large house from an early age, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her elder sister—both of whose places in her life have been filled by a governess, one Miss Taylor, whose "mildness of…temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint," so that Emma has grown up "doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor's judgment, but directed chiefly by her own." Austen doesn't mince words:
The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.
But now things have changed, because Miss Taylor has become Mrs. Weston and left the Woodhouse establishment for one of her own. Emma consoles herself for the loss of her friend to "a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners" by remembering that she's the one who pretty much threw them in each other's path in the first place, and blocked any avenue of escape until they looked around and noticed each other and thought, "Hubba hubba." So she takes credit for the match; "but it was a black morning's work for her", because it's now left her alone at home with her voraciously infirm father, and no one to follow her around all day and listen to her prattle and watch her kick up her heels and just generally reinforce her belief that God created Emma Woodhouse on Day One and then the rest of the cosmos on Two through Seven.
Austen's narrative tone here is gentler, kindlier; but I think this is a deliberate dodge, an attempt at ironic dissonance. For instance, she says of Emma's father that "having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though every where beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time." This has fooled many people into imagining Mr. Woodhouse to be an adorable old darling with a shawl over his knees and a twinkle in his eyes; but as the novel progresses it becomes ever clearer that he's the sheerest horror. He represents a kind of tremulous nihilism, a nervous entropy; he's like a bubbling tar pit, trying to entrap everyone in the vicinity and fossilize them before they can grow, change, breathe. He's terribly funny, of course, but he's a genuine danger; if he and Fanny Price ever came within a dozen yards of each other, their combined frigidity would snuff out the sun. When he sighs over how much he'll miss "Poor Miss Taylor," Emma reminds him that the Westons only live a half-mile off.
"…We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay our wedding-visit very soon."
"My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far."
"No, papa; nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure."
"The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;—and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?"
"They are to be put into Mr. Weston's stable, papa. You know we have settled all that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night…"
You can bet she'll have to "settle all that" about six hundred times more before anybody gets anywhere near a carriage. You get the sense that Mr. Woodhouse is a temporal anomaly; he can slow time, stop it, and on good days even set it creeping in reverse.
He and Emma live in a great house called Hartfield, whose palatial grounds abut a small village, Highbury, in which the most of the novel's other characters live in the kind of rustic cheerfulness that makes them no match at all for Emma. She's basically a queen on a chessboard where the only other players left are pawns. And as we'll see, that's pretty much how she treats them.
But she does long for someone who isn't abject or overawed in her presence—someone with whom she can have an actual conversation. And here he comes now, dropping by to relieve the tedium in which Mr. Woodhouse has been so happily marinating: Mr Knightley, "a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty," a longtime friend of the family and, since Emma's sister's marriage to his own brother, a member of the extended family himself.
Emma is delighted to see him, though Mr. Woodhouse is concerned that he's come at so late an hour; "I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk" — as though a stroll through the chill night air were the equivalent of being beset by gypsies. Mr. Knightley assures him of having been assaulted by nothing more discomposing than beautiful moonlight.
"But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold."
"Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them."
"Well! That is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour, while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding."
With just a little more youth and vigor, Mr. Woodhouse would be the kind of character you find in gothic horror fiction, burying children in the basement to save them from the cruel world. As if to reinforce this, he now hangs his head, for talk has turned—inevitably—to the day's festivities. "Ah! Poor Miss Taylor! 'tis a sad business," he says, lamenting that the lady in question has got away from him before he could have her walled up in the linen pantry. Mr. Knightley tries to make him see that the change is a happy one for the bride, it being "better to have only one to please than two."
"Especially when one of those two is a fanciful, troublesome creature!" said Emma playfully. "That is what…you would certainly say if my father were not by."
"I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed," said Mr. Woodhouse with a sigh. "I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome."
"My dearest papa! You do not think I could mean you…I meant only myself. Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know—in a joke—it is all a joke. We always say what we like to each other."
After three novels, we know instantly what Austen is setting up here. In the oeuvre of this supposedly proto-romantic writer, lovers are marked as predestined for each other not by deranging fits of attraction, or attacks of galloping passion, but by spiky, brittle, stinging bouts of conversation—in fact, by mockery and sarcasm. Emma and Knightley's snarky verbal jousting is just Austen's version of a full-throttle Puccini duet, with trills and crescendos and a chorus of sixty on the bridge.
And if you need any further proof, this early in the novel, that the romance quotient going forward will be hovering at just about zero, here's Emma's retelling (to Knightley, who wasn't there) of the of the nuptial ceremony itself, in all its giddy, flowery, transcendent sentimentality:
"Well," said Emma…"you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly. Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen. Oh, no; we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and were sure of meeting every day."
For Austen, who usually dashes out descriptions of weddings in a single line, with all the ardor of a Post-It note reminder to buy mouthwash, the fragment above really is an outpouring of detail.
Emma then adds that, much as she'll miss her governess, she takes pride in the marriage being of her own devising. "I made the match, you know," she brags, "four years ago; and to have it take place…when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing." At which her father begs her never, ever to do any such thing again, "for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches."
"I promise to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world!"
And there it is, right there: the rest of the novel all laid out for us. Because we can see what Mr. Knightley sees: that despite Emma's long (very long) account of her campaign to land Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston at the altar together, the resultant wedding can scarcely be claimed as her "success."
"Success supposes endeavour. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady's mind! but if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only…your saying to yourself one idle day, 'I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,' and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards,—why do you talk of success? where is your merit? What are you proud of? You made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be said."
Emma shoots back that "a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it," which Knightley waves away with, "A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference"…
…and yes, I confess, I could happily sit and listen to them snipe at each other like this until my spine permanently curved. As I noted earlier (in my discussion of Lizzy and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice), Austen's acerbic, sarcastic, unwitting lovers belong to a tradition that goes back at least to Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick, and on through Tracy and Hepburn, right up to…well, choose your sitcom, basically. But nobody has ever done it better than our gal J.A. and her baaaad attitude.
Emma then brazenly flouts Knightley's judgment of her by announcing that she's already settled on the new clergyman, Mr. Elton, as the next beneficiary of her matchmaking skills. He's been at Highbury a full year and it's high time he was saddled with a wife, and besides, when he was officiating at the wedding earlier that day, "he looked so much as if he would like to have the same kind of office done for him! I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service."
So right away, we know Mr. Elton is in trubbah. And so does Knightley, who says, "Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven and twenty can take care of himself." But this bit of wisdom doesn't quite reflect as handsomely on Knightley as it might, because if he were really wise he'd realize that saying it aloud will have precisely the opposite effect of the one intended. Unless he wants Emma to go rushing out into the larger world, grabbing people by their collars and making a first-class idiot of herself. Which, now that I think of it…hmm.
The succeeding chapter switches gears in order to give us the back-story of the bridegroom. Here's where Austen's juvenile years, penning three- and four-page epics in which people meet, love, and die amidst all manner of tumult and tragedy, show their bounty; because the story of Mr. Weston functions almost as a little novella all on its own.
The youngest of three brothers, he eschewed their "homely pursuits" in order to enter the militia; then, as Captain Weston, he met a certain Miss Churchill "of a great Yorkshire family," and the two fell in love. Miss Churchill's brother and his wife, "full of pride and importance, which the connection would offend," opposed the match; but Miss Churchill defied them and married him anyway, and her relations threw her off. Alas, the resulting union was not a happy one.
[Miss Churchill] had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother's unreasoning anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home. They lived beyond their income, but still it was nothing in comparison to Enscombe; she did not cease to love her husband; but she wanted at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.
If we must have modern writers undertaking Jane Austen sequels and "prequels," you'd think one of them would at least be enterprising enough to tackle this intriguing creature, instead of yet more intensive scrutiny into the navel of Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Anyway, the former Miss Churchill bears a son and dies, leaving Captain Western a whole lot poorer and burdened with a baby. But the brother and sister-in-law step in to relieve him; having had their tempers softened by their sister's illness, and "having no children of their own, nor any other young creature of equal kindred to care for, [they] offered to take the whole charge of little Frank soon after her decease."
Suddenly liberated from all responsibility, Captain Weston left the militia, went into trade, prospered, moved to Highbury, and "the next eighteen or twenty years of his life passed cheerfully away", apparently so very cheerfully that we can't be sure which it was, eighteen or twenty, but what's a couple of lost years between friends?  Little Frank, in the meantime, so ingratiated himself in his uncle and aunt's affections that they bestowed their name on him as well. He has grown up "a very fine young man," as Mr. Weston is able to report to all his neighbors, for he sees his son every year in London, and they're on very good terms. In a small provincial town with a limited pool of inhabitants and a higher-than-average ratio of middle-aged biddies, this kind of material proves tinder for a whole firestorm of gossip.
Mr. Frank Churchill was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little returned that he had never been there in his life. His coming to visit his father had been often talked of but never achieved.
Now, upon his father's marriage, it was very generally proposed, as a most proper attention, that the visit should take place.
Then, as if to swell the excitement to full-on nuclear proportions, we find out that Frank Churchill has written to his new mother to congratulate her on the marriage.
For a few days every morning visit in Highbury included some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received. "I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill had written to Mrs. Weston? I understood it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life."
Aside from being a wonderfully funny evocation of the head-banging monotony of what passes for interest in village life, it's also our first indication that in fact Mr. Woodhouse is really one of the novel's cast of clucking old hens; but after the first twinge of surprise, it does seem entirely right.
The handsome letter provides Mr. Woodhouse a distraction from his continuing distress over the loss of Miss Taylor to the rapacious world in which people insist on actually doing things. We hear of occasions on which he and Emma "left her at Randalls in the centre of every domestic comfort, or saw her go away in the evening attended by her pleasant husband to a carriage of her own"—and each time Mr. Woodhouse heaves a sigh and says, "Ah, poor Miss Taylor! She would be very glad to stay." But soon enough the novelty of the wedding subsides, and Mr. Woodhouse enjoys some welcome relief.
The compliments of his neighbors were over; he was no longer teased by being wished joy of so sorrowful an event; and the wedding-cake, which had been a great distress to him, was all ate up.
That's right—in addition to being a control-freak and a gossip, Mr. Woodhouse is also a crank. "His own stomach could bear nothing rich, and he could never believe other people to be different from himself." Austen riffs on this for a while, turning the wedding cake into the prop for a whole comic monologue, but while we're laughing we're wondering what new ghastly trait Mr. Woodhouse will exhibit next. Maybe he's parsimonious, or flatulent, or beats the household dogs with a crop.
We have a chance to see him now in a new setting, as the scene shifts to an evening party at Hartfield—this being a regular occurrence at the great house, because "Mr. Woodhouse was fond of society in his own way. He liked very much to have his friends come and see him," for which reason "there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him."
Alas, not all is pleasure for the paterfamilias on these occasions.
He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth; but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see anything put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visiters to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.
Not that anyone can really tuck in anyway, with Mr. Woodhouse hovering over them and parceling out crumbs as though they might be radioactive:
"Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else,—but you not need be afraid, they are very small, you see,—one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart—a very little bit…Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you."
I like to picture him attempting this kind of thing at one of my Italian family's free-for-alls. Interpose yourself between a guest and the pasta platter there, and you risk having your arm devoured along with the pappardelle.
The Miss Bates to whom Mr. Woodhouse addresses himself here is one of several new characters we meet in this chapter, and the only one who can match him for sheer comic brio. She is the single daughter of an ancient mother—"the widow of a former vicar of Highbury…a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille"—and the two live alone very humbly (or, since most of Highbury lives humbly, I should maybe say very very humbly).
Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favor; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will.
But beyond this, she is a talker; perhaps the most voluble and indefatigable of any talker Jane Austen ever invented. She doesn't say much in this first chapter of our acquaintance with her—or rather, Austen doesn't report much of what she says, because you can bet both your ass and your assets she's off in the margins somewhere firing away like a gatling gun—but we'll become exhaustively familiar with her epic chattering before too long.
The other new characters—who join Mrs. and Miss Bates, the Westons, and Mr. Knightley as the dinner guests this evening—include Mr. Elton, the young cleric Emma has chosen to play Cupid for ("a young man living alone without liking it," for whom "the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse's drawing-room and the smiles of his lovely daughter" is just the ticket, thanks).
Then there's Mrs. Goddard, the mistress of a school; she's one of Austen's blander creations, but provides the opportunity for one of her more spirited snarks:
Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school,—not a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems,—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity,—but a real, honest, old fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.
And finally we have Harriet Smith, a pretty young girl who happens to be one of those aforementioned non-prodigies. She is "the natural daughter of somebody. Somebody had placed her, several years back, at Mrs. Goddard's school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour boarder. This was all that was generally known of her history." Miss Smith has fallen into easy intimacy with some tenants of Mr. Knightley, named Martin, but Emma, impressed by Harriet's looks and demeanor, thinks she deserves better, and needs only a little notice and encouragement to rise higher. Which is of course just the thing Emma loves better than a hound loves a hambone.
She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming to her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.
At this point you may actually find yourself thinking a little bit ahead; and if the train of your thought is along the lines of, "Aha! Emma wants to marry off Mr. Elton, and she wants to improve Miss Smith's situation. Two birds, one stone, maybe?"—well, then, give yourself a big gold star and as many goddamned boiled eggs as you want, you great big genius, you.
And come on back here next time to see how it all starts going horribly awry.

More home news

ITEM ONE: I've been working away on Emma and have one full post already in the can. You'll be seeing it oh so soon.


And...


ITEM TWO: You will be seeing it here. I gave due consideration to switching blog hosts, but frankly there's so much going on in my life right now that the idea of entering one more new relationship makes my head go all twitchy. So you'll find my romp through Emma right where you've found my romps through everything else.


However...


ITEM THREE: You will no longer find those earlier romps. When I publish my first Emma post, I will be deleting all the posts prior to that.


Because...


ITEM FOUR: The collected Bitch In a Bonnet Vol. I, covering Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, is now available as a handsome new trade paperback! Since it's also available as an e-book for Kindle and Nook, that means the text is now commercially accessible to any reader who wants it. And since poppa's got bills to pay, he don't need to be givin' it away for free no more. I'm just sayin', is all.


That's it for now, kids. See y'all in Highbury!