Emma

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Hartfield, Mr Woodhouse, and the Harriet Smith project
2. Mr Elton, the charade, and the carriage in the snow
3. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax come to Highbury
4. Strawberries at Donwell, the Crown ball, and the gipsies
5. Box Hill and the insult Emma cannot take back
6. Secrets at Randalls and what Emma finally sees
7. Who should try it and what to forgive
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I put off Emma for years because I had heard the heroine was spoiled and hard to like. Jane Austen herself is supposed to have said Emma was a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, and friends kept warning me that she meddles for three volumes and learns her lesson very late. I finally picked it up after rereading Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility back to back and wanting the third big comedy from her middle years.

What surprised me was how funny it is from the first page, and how clearly Austen wants you to see through Emma while still staying close to her. The book was published in late 1815 by John Murray in three volumes, with the title page dated 1816. The edition I used runs about 474 pages. It is set almost entirely in Highbury, a Surrey village, and the surrounding houses of Hartfield, Randalls and Donwell Abbey. If Pride and Prejudice is about judging too fast, Emma is about imagining too much.

Emma Woodhouse is twenty one, handsome, clever and rich, living at Hartfield with her widowed father. Her mother is dead. Her older sister Isabella is married to John Knightley and living in London. Her governess Miss Taylor has just married Mr Weston and become Mrs Weston, which leaves Emma both pleased and oddly flat. She has no need to marry for money, no work to do, and a great deal of confidence in her own reading of other people.

Hartfield, Mr Woodhouse, and the Harriet Smith project

Mr Woodhouse is the first person you meet after Emma, and he sets the tone for Hartfield life. He is kind, nervous about health, afraid of drafts and rich cake and any change to dinner. He thinks gruel is safe and marriage is risky. He loved Miss Taylor and misses her, and he worries that Randalls is too damp and that Isabella will catch cold on the road from London. Some readers find him only comic. I found him sadder on a second look. He loves Emma so completely that he has never told her no in a way that stuck, and Hartfield runs on his comfort.

Mr George Knightley is the counterweight. He is thirty seven or thirty eight, owner of Donwell Abbey, brother to Isabella's husband John, and Emma's friend since she was a child. He is the only person in Highbury who tells Emma plainly when she is wrong. Early on he warns her about Harriet Smith, and the whole book turns on the fact that she does not listen.

Harriet Smith is seventeen, pretty, sweet tempered, and a boarder at Mrs Goddard's school in Highbury. She is illegitimate, with unknown parents, and very open to guidance. Emma takes her up partly from kindness and partly from boredom after Mrs Weston leaves. She likes the idea of improving Harriet, dressing her a little better, teaching her how to speak, and then marrying her to someone suitable.

The first test comes fast. Robert Martin, a respectable young farmer who rents Abbey Mill Farm from Knightley, writes Harriet a plain, respectful proposal. Harriet is inclined to accept. She respects him. She has known his family. Emma talks her out of it. She tells Harriet that a farmer is beneath her, that Harriet deserves a gentleman, that attachment can be set aside. Harriet refuses Martin. Knightley hears what happened and is angry in a way that still feels hot on the page. He says Emma has ruined Harriet's best chance from vanity.

Emma instead decides Harriet should marry Mr Elton, the young vicar of Highbury. He is good looking, polite, fond of society, and often at Hartfield. Emma sketches Harriet's portrait, hangs around while Elton praises the drawing, and reads every compliment to the picture as love for the sitter. She pushes Harriet to like him. She throws them together at Hartfield and at Randalls. Harriet, who trusts Emma completely, obliges and falls hard.

I winced through these chapters because Austen makes Emma's logic feel so natural from inside. Emma notices real things. Elton does visit often. He does admire the portrait. She just assigns the wrong cause. Knightley sees it. Mrs Weston half sees it but is too fond of Emma to press. Mr Woodhouse sees nothing except that Harriet is a sweet girl who should not walk home alone in the damp.

Mr Elton, the charade, and the carriage in the snow

The Elton plot builds through small Highbury rituals. There is a charade Elton brings to Hartfield, copied out for Harriet's riddle book. The answer is courtship, and Emma is sure it is aimed at Harriet. There is talk after a dinner at the Westons. There is Elton asking Emma to draw, to choose, to approve.

Then comes Christmas Eve at Randalls. The party is small. Snow starts falling. Mr Woodhouse worries about going home. Mr Weston drinks a little too much and sings. On the drive back the carriages get sorted badly, and Emma ends up alone with Elton in a carriage in the snow. He seizes the moment, but not for Harriet. He proposes to Emma herself, heated and a little drunk, sure that her smiles meant encouragement.

Emma is horrified and genuinely shaken. She refuses him short. Elton is offended, leaves Highbury for Bath, and Harriet is left crying over a man who never thought of her. Emma blames herself, and for once the blame is fair. She had encouraged Harriet to refuse a good man for a fantasy, and encouraged Elton to hang around Hartfield by flattering him.

Elton returns from Bath engaged to Augusta Hawkins, a young woman with money and opinions and no sense of Highbury. Mrs Elton, as she becomes, is loud about lace and carriages and her brother in law's estate at Maple Grove. She calls Knightley by his Christian name too fast. She tries to patronize Jane Fairfax. She snubs Harriet openly. Austen makes her grating on purpose, and some modern readers tire of her scenes. I thought she was necessary. She shows Emma what meddling social ambition looks like from outside, and Emma hates her while missing the likeness.

Harriet mends slowly. She keeps Elton's last look and a bit of court plaister he once used, which broke my heart a little. Emma burns those keepsakes in a small fire scene that is kinder than much of what came before. She tells Harriet to think less of Elton. For a few weeks Highbury settles.

Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax come to Highbury

The middle of the book belongs to two arrivals everyone has been waiting for.

Frank Churchill is Mr Weston's son by his first marriage, raised by his rich aunt and uncle at Enscombe after his mother died. He is handsome, lively, writes good letters, and keeps promising to visit Randalls without coming. When his aunt Mrs Churchill's health allows, he finally comes. He charms Mrs Weston at once. He charms Emma. He talks about Highbury as if he already loves it. He wants a ball at the Crown Inn. He gets his hair cut in London on a whim and laughs about it. Emma, who had been a little bored, lights up.

Jane Fairfax is the other arrival, and Emma dreads her. Jane is twenty, beautiful, reserved, accomplished at music and singing, an orphan raised by her grandmother Mrs Bates and her talkative aunt Miss Bates, then educated by friends of her dead father. She has no fortune and faces work as a governess. She has been away visiting friends and now returns to Highbury before taking a post. Emma has always felt Jane was too cold and too perfect, and she dislikes being second in any accomplishment. She is polite in public and cool in private.

Miss Bates deserves a paragraph of her own because Austen gives her so many pages. She is middle aged, unmarried, poor, cheerful, and almost unable to stop talking. She repeats news three times. She thanks people at length for small kindnesses. She praises Jane constantly. Mr Woodhouse likes her because she is safe company. Emma finds her tedious and says so to Harriet. Knightley keeps defending her. I started impatient with her long speeches about Jane's letters and Mrs Cole's pork and the new umbrella. By the end I was protective of her. Her talk is how she holds fear off. If Jane must go out as a governess, Miss Bates and her old mother will be left with very little.

A piano arrives mysteriously for Jane from London, from Broadwood, with no card. Highbury gossips. Emma jokes it must be from Mr Dixon, a married friend from Weymouth. Jane is upset rather than pleased. Frank makes jokes about it. Knightley, quietly, suspects a secret lover. He is right, though the book hides it well on first reading.

The word game at Hartfield is a good example of how Austen plants clues. Frank pushes little word puzzles at Jane across the table. They spell Dixon in front of everyone while Emma laughs. Jane gets angry and breaks off. Emma reads the whole scene as Frank flirting with her and teasing Jane. On reread it is clearly a private quarrel carried on in public. Frank is careless. Jane is stretched thin.

Emma convinces herself she is in love with Frank, or at least in danger of it. Mrs Weston thinks Frank admires Emma. Mr Weston hopes for a match. Even Knightley is disturbed enough to leave for London for a while, which Emma notices more than she admits. Only Jane stays apart, practicing, walking to the post office in the rain rather than letting Miss Bates fetch her letters, refusing offers that would make her life easier.

Strawberries at Donwell, the Crown ball, and the gipsies

Donwell Abbey is Knightley's estate, and the strawberry picking party there is one of the best set pieces. Knightley invites the whole circle. Mrs Elton tries to take charge, talks about Maple Grove peaches, and suggests the party move to her schedule. Emma is rude in return, which is satisfying and also childish. Knightley shows Emma his grounds with real pride. He talks about his apples and his hay with the same care he uses in argument. Harriet separates from the group with Miss Bates and Jane for a little, and Emma notices Jane is unwell and withdrawn.

Earlier, Harriet has a fright on the road to Highbury. She and Miss Bickerton meet gipsies who beg for money and turn threatening. Harriet screams. Frank happens to ride up and drives them off. Harriet is saved and instantly grateful. She falls for Frank with the same completeness she once fell for Elton. Emma, who still thinks Frank is courting her, encourages Harriet to hope in a vague way while privately thinking Frank is above Harriet. It is uncomfortable to watch Emma repeat the same mistake with a new name.

The ball at the Crown Inn matters because it is public. Mrs Weston arranges it. Frank arrives late after Mrs Churchill first forbids and then permits. He dances well. He keeps Emma as a partner. Mrs Elton swans. Mr Elton pointedly refuses to dance with Harriet, leaving her sitting without a partner while others pretend not to see. Knightley, who does not love dancing, steps forward and asks Harriet himself. The room notices. Emma watches with a rush of respect that startled me the first time. Knightley later praises Robert Martin to Emma in plain terms. He says Martin is a solid young man, well able to keep a wife, and that Harriet would have been lucky. Emma hears it as interference and changes the subject.

There are smaller Highbury threads Austen keeps alive without fuss. Mr Perry the apothecary and his carriage plans. Mrs Goddard's school. Mr Cole's dinner party that Emma and Mr Woodhouse first refuse and then attend. Mrs Weston's pregnancy moving along in the background. Isabella and John Knightley visiting from London with their children, with Isabella worrying about health just like her father and John teasing Emma about Frank. Those visits remind you that Emma's world is small but crowded, and that everyone reports back to someone.

Box Hill and the insult Emma cannot take back

The Box Hill excursion is short and brutal, and Austen wrote it to be remembered.

The group goes up for the view. Frank is restless. Mrs Elton is bossy. Harriet is quiet. Jane wants to go home. Emma, trying to be lively for Frank, keeps joking. Miss Bates makes one of her good natured speeches about how much she will say and how dull it must sound. Emma cuts in with a sharp public joke about Miss Bates being limited to only three dull things. The party laughs. Miss Bates flushes and tries to laugh along.

Knightley says nothing at the time. On the ride home he speaks to Emma alone, and the scene still stings. He tells her she has insulted a woman with little to defend herself, a woman whose poverty and cheerfulness should have protected her from Emma's wit. He says Jane must have felt it too. Emma cries all evening. She cannot sleep. For once she does not argue or explain.

I found this the strongest moral writing in the book because Austen does not let Emma off with tears alone. Emma goes to Hartfield the next morning and calls on Miss Bates early, before the usual visiting hour. She sits in the small crowded parlor. Miss Bates is flustered and kind. Her mother dozes. Jane is clearly ill and stays in another room, then comes out briefly and coldly refuses Emma's offer of friendship and help. Emma leaves shaken. Knightley's approval when he hears of the visit matters more to her than any compliment Frank ever gave her.

Fair criticism belongs here too. Box Hill works so well that the chapters around it can feel slow by design. Austen keeps Frank and Jane circling without explaining them. Mrs Elton repeats herself. Mr Woodhouse repeats himself about gruel and evening air. The Highbury talk about who called on whom can drag if you are waiting for plot. I had to put the book down for two days in this stretch and came back fresher. The payoff is worth it, but the middle asks patience that Pride and Prejudice never asks.

There is also the class problem modern readers feel at once. Emma's power over Harriet comes from money and rank. She can ruin Harriet's marriage chance with a few sentences over tea and face almost no consequence except guilt. Austen knows this and shows it, but she does not preach about it. If you need the book to condemn Emma's snobbery outright, you will be frustrated. The condemnation comes through Knightley's anger and Harriet's tears, not through speeches.

Secrets at Randalls and what Emma finally sees

After Box Hill the secrets break fast.

Mrs Churchill dies at Enscombe. The news reaches Highbury and changes everything because Frank is suddenly free from the aunt who controlled him. He writes a long letter to Mrs Weston confessing what Knightley had guessed and Emma had missed completely. Frank has been secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax since they met at Weymouth. The piano was from him. The secrecy was to protect Jane from Mrs Churchill's anger and to protect his inheritance. His flirting with Emma was cover, encouraged by Jane's jealousy and his own carelessness. His rudeness at Box Hill came after a private quarrel with Jane that nearly ended the engagement.

Jane, exhausted and ashamed, had broken with Frank and accepted a governess post with Mrs Smallridge's family. She refused Emma's help partly from pride and partly because she could not bear another kind lady managing her. When Frank's letter arrives and he rides back to Highbury, they reconcile. Miss Bates is overjoyed and tells everyone everything three times over. Mrs Elton tries to claim credit for finding Jane a post and is ignored.

Emma's first fear is for Harriet. She believes Harriet loves Frank, since Harriet told her so after the gipsy rescue, and she dreads telling her friend that Frank is lost. She goes to Harriet ready to console. Harriet surprises her. Harriet says her feelings for Frank have passed and that she now loves someone higher still, someone who danced with her when no one else would. Harriet means Knightley.

That sentence hits Emma like cold water. She listens to Harriet praise Knightley's kindness at the Crown ball and his goodness to Robert Martin, and she feels sick. She walks around Hartfield that night and admits what she has hidden from herself for months. She loves Knightley. Not as a brother or a teacher. As the man she wants to marry. And she believes she has taught Harriet to hope for him too, which would be the worst harm yet.

Austen handles Emma's self reckoning without making her suddenly perfect. Emma thinks back over Frank's attentions and sees her own vanity. She thinks over Jane and sees envy. She thinks over Harriet and sees control dressed as friendship. She resolves to stop matchmaking and to accept whatever Harriet chooses, even if it hurts her. I believed the change because it costs her sleep and appetite, not because she announces it.

Knightley comes to Hartfield expecting to find Emma heartbroken over Frank. He has been in London, miserable, convinced Frank would marry Emma. He means to comfort her. Instead Emma tells him Frank is engaged to Jane, and she watches his face change from pity to relief to something warmer. He confesses he loves her. She accepts with more trembling than I expected from Emma Woodhouse. They agree to wait a little before telling Mr Woodhouse, who will hate any change, and before telling Harriet, who must hear it gently.

Harriet's ending is handled with unusual tenderness. Robert Martin meets Harriet again through Knightley's doing. He had never stopped caring. He proposes a second time, in person and plainly. Harriet, older by a year and clearer about kindness versus flattery, accepts him with real joy. Emma approves with her whole heart and apologizes to Harriet for her interference. Harriet marries Martin and settles at Abbey Mill Farm. It is the happiest match in the book after the two main ones, and Austen gives it weight.

Emma and Knightley marry after Mrs Weston's baby Anna is born and after Mr Woodhouse is soothed with the plan that they will live at Hartfield rather than Donwell so he will not be left alone. Jane and Frank marry and leave Highbury for a time. Mrs Elton keeps talking about Maple Grove. Miss Bates keeps talking about Jane's letters, but now with joy. Mr Woodhouse keeps worrying about cake at the wedding breakfast. Highbury keeps gossiping, but more kindly.

Who should try it and what to forgive

Read Emma if you like comedies where the joke is on the narrator and you are allowed to notice before she does. Read it for Knightley's temper, Miss Bates's speeches, Mrs Weston's patience, and the slow reveal of Jane Fairfax as the quiet heroine Emma refuses to see. The Crown ball and Donwell strawberries and Box Hill make a run of scenes as good as anything Austen wrote.

Forgive the slow middle and the repetition. Forgive Emma herself for the first half. She is snobbish about Robert Martin in a way that still jars, she is cruel to Miss Bates in a way Austen wants you to feel, and she wastes many pages on Frank Churchill's games. If you want fast plot or grand romance, this is not that book. The romance arrives late and talks a great deal about houses and fathers and neighbors.

I closed my 474 page copy thinking less about who married whom and more about Highbury as a place that teaches attention. Emma learns to listen to Miss Bates without planning her reply, to praise Jane without adding a cut, to let Harriet choose without steering. Knightley learns to wait without scolding. That sounds small beside war novels and mysteries. After three weeks in Highbury it felt large enough.

FAQ

Who does Emma marry?

Emma marries Mr George Knightley after she admits she loves him and he confesses he loves her. They settle at Hartfield so Mr Woodhouse will not live alone.

Why did Frank Churchill keep his engagement to Jane Fairfax secret?

Frank and Jane Fairfax met at Weymouth and kept their engagement secret to avoid angering Mrs Churchill at Enscombe. His open flirting with Emma was cover that hurt Jane and misled Highbury.

Is Emma hard to like at first?

Yes for many readers, since she controls Harriet and mocks Miss Bates at Box Hill. Austen keeps Knightley and Mrs Weston close so you see her faults while watching her change.