Discuss the plot-structure of Jane Austen's 'Emma'
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Emma, novel by Jane Austen, published in three volumes in 1815.
SUMMARY: Of all Austen’s novels, Emma is the most consistently comic in tone. It centres on Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman who indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbours. After a series of humiliating errors, a chastened Emma finds her destiny in marriage to the mature and protective George Knightley, a neighbouring squire who had been her mentor and friend.
engraving of Jane Austen
engraving of Jane Austen
A 19th-century engraving of Jane Austen, likely derived from a portrait by her sister, Cassandra Austen, c. 1810.
7 Continents History/Everett Collection
DETAIL: Austen said of her fourth published novel that it would contain a heroine no one would like but herself—and as if to prove her wrong, generations of readers have warmed to the flawed protagonist of Emma. “Handsome, clever and rich,’’ Emma is a young woman used to ruling over the small social world of the village of Highbury. The comedy as well as the psychological interest of the novel lies in seeing what happens when people fail to act as she hopes and ordains. She attempts to pair her protégée Harriet Smith with two unsuitable candidates, and completely fails to read the true direction of the men’s affections. She also fails to decipher, until it is almost too late, the nature of her own feelings for Mr. Knightley, her wise neighbor who functions throughout as Emma’s only critic. Some recent readers view the novel as dangerously paternalistic in its intertwining of romance and moral education, but it should be said that Emma is less concerned with teaching a lesson than in exploring the mortifying effects of learning one. Austen’s trademark blending of an omniscient and ironic third-person narrative voice with a more indirect style that renders individual points of view comes into its own. A form suited both to the novel’s concerns with individual, solipsistic desires and to its overarching moral commitment to the importance of frankness and mutual intelligibility, it points the way toward later nineteenth-century works of novelistic realism.