Jane Austen: Emma

Jane Austen's Emma (1815) is not as accomplished as Pride and Prejudice but it is one of her better novels.

The twenty-one year old title character is described in the first sentence as handsome, clever and rich and a little later (on chapter 10) she confesses to a friend that she has “very little intention of ever marrying at all”. This appears to be terribly upsetting as we know Jane Austen's novels are virtually about women in quest of a marriage with financial security. Otherwise, we are in Austen's world. We get acquainted with a number of characters and join their dinners and dances, eavesdrop on their conversations and take walks or picnics in the country. We find out how they dress, what they eat, how they talk and think. Men “of advantage” occasionally disappear for business and their women have precious little to occupy themselves with. Servants are the silent majority. I don't remember a significant dialogue with any of them or a single name being given. I think that today's authors are far more generous with things because sometimes they do give the brand of a car or a vacuum cleaner.

Emma is a novel in which virtually nothing happens. It has four marriages of course but we expect nothing less from a Jane Austin novel. It is also masterful in its use of realism, character, and the daily 19^th century life of a small town. This supreme comedy of manners makes it plain as to why Jane Austen is one of the most widely read authors of English literature. Her six novels and earlier stories have each found their way into several films, plays and TV serials.

Reader, you may hate me for saying this, but I think that Jane Austen is also the greatest gossip who ever lived. How can I say such a terrible thing about a great writer and expect to get away with it? Mainly because I count my readers in the thousands and she in the millions. You see, I am too slight to diminish her greatness! But because I am a writer, I have some understanding of why people write. So, before you knock me down, let's briefly look at her life.

Jane Austen was part of a close-knit country family, staying forever indoors and meeting few people. She received a single proposal of marriage from an unattractive, tactless and aggressive man which she accepted immediately--only to refuse him the next day. So she remained a spinster and lived with her sister until her early death at forty-one years old. It is no secret, as she points out in her novels, that women of means in her century had little to do in their lives other than marry, run a house and organize social events. She did not have this potential. But she did have a talent: She wrote well. So she used her writing as a means of escape from her meagre life. She inhabited the lives of her major heroines, met wonderful men who proposed to her, married them and got carried off to their lavish mansions. And within this framework she introduced tens of characters who did little but observe each other's conversation and behaviour. Many, if not most of them, have little or no bearing to the story. Analysts say that they establish the background. But do we really need so very many? Do I need to tell you what each of my neighbours says or does to establish the background of my neighbourhood? I might do so, but how many pages would I use in a 500 page book? Would two be enough? How about five? Reader, I have made no formal study, but my feeling is that she doesn't use 50 or even 100. I would think that about half of Emma is packed with all this. So it can't be the background but stage centre. Now what would you call that?

I would call it gossip. Only in gossip does the background of a place take stage centre. And how successful can a person be at it? Well, if you cover your neighbourhood and carry the information to your family, you are ordinary. If you carry it back to your entire neighbourhood, then you are good. If you manage to print it in your local paper you are excellent. And if you are the marvellous Elsa Maxwell and publish it across an entire country and the world you are the best of the best! Or are you? What if you are a great writer and manage to disguise gossip as literature? What if it's read by millions across the world for the last two centuries and many more to come?

Reader, hate me if you must, but please admit that what I say is logical. And if you mistrust my logic, simply look at her only surviving picture above.

I don't know what she looks like to you, but I have to keep reminding myself that she is also a great writer!