‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,’ Jane Austen said as she began Emma. It was a dare — and the result is her most perfect and most daring novel, a comedy built around a young woman who is spoiled, snobbish, meddlesome, and almost always wrong.
Emma Woodhouse is rich, clever, and certain she knows best. She plays god with other people’s hearts, arranging matches that go disastrously awry, and she is blind — comically, painfully blind — to the one thing the reader can see: her own heart. Austen’s brilliance is to trap us inside Emma’s confident misjudgements, so that we make every mistake alongside her and are as startled as she is when the truth arrives.
Why write an unlikable heroine? Because likability is cheap, and growth is not. The novel is the story of Emma learning to see — learning, in the mortifying scene at Box Hill, that her cleverness has been cruelty, and becoming, by the end, someone worth the man who has quietly loved her all along. We forgive her because we have been her: sure we were helping, sure we were right.
It is, as we have argued, the most flawless comic novel in English. Read it with the economics of Austen.
Read Emma — the Erato Press edition →
Enjoyed this piece?
Get the next one — our essays on the classics and news of each new Erato Press edition — straight to your inbox.