Just Finished Reading Jane Austen's Emma

Jane Austen is one of England's most famous and beloved novelists, having written her works in the early nineteenth century.  I had read only one of her books, Pride and Prejudice, which also happens to be her most well-known.  Here is my December 2014 review of it [link].  Although I liked that 1813 story of hers, I didn't get around to reading anything else by her until I just read her 1815 novel Emma...also widely acclaimed.  And once again, Austen's protagonist is a strong-willed young woman in the midst of that highly stratified English society way back then...

Emma Woodhouse, although young, attractive, rich, and well-placed in her society according to class, has no intention of falling in love, much less ever getting married.  That doesn't prevent her, though, from playing the matchmaker with other couples.  She has taken under her wings Harriet, a young woman who Emma believes is in danger of allowing herself to become engaged to a man beneath her station in life.  So our meddling protagonist encourages her friend to break off their relationship while promoting one with a "higher-class" Mr. Elton.  All signs seem to indicate that they will become a couple until it comes out that this man's attentions are directed at Emma, not Harriet.  And no, I'm not going to tell you everything that happens in this story.  Suffice to say that it all becomes a web of intrigues between a small number of characters who are continually letting themselves be deceived by misdirected romantic signals, be they directed by them or to them.  The question of who loves whom becomes paramount, and the assumptions that the characters make in this regard are usually comically wrong...

Emma, although on the surface a serious story, to me ends up being more of a comedy.  The plot is driven overwhelmingly by dialogue, and Jane Austen is a master at it, revealing all of the nuances of each character's personality by what they choose to talk about and how they say it.  My favorite character is Miss Bates, a friend of Emma's family who is a non-stop talker going on and on about all sorts of topics, most of them inane and irrelevant.  Just imagine Edith Bunker...on steroids.  Very funny she is, along with the cascading misunderstandings of the characters about each other...

There's not a lot of action in Emma: it is a tale about relationships set in a culture that would be hard to recognize or understand in our twenty-first century America.  I don't buy into all that old nonsense about social class, and I bet you probably don't, either.  Still, the story demands, as most all do, that the reader temporarily suspend his or her notions about some things in order to more deeply follow it.  Well, I'm done reading it and can now go back to my more egalitarian views on society.  I recommend Emma, although I feel that Pride and Prejudice was better...