Emma, by Jane Austen

After Pride and Prejudice, Emma is probably Austen’s best-known work.  Austen called Emma a heroine "whom no one but myself will much like" and I found myself coming down on the side of not much liking the main character although I certainly enjoyed the book.  Twenty-one year old Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever and rich,” lives a life of comfort and ease as the younger daughter of a difficult widowed father.  She has a “happy disposition” but is oblivious to her own faults, is socially snobbish, and what a modern-day reader would call a control freak.  Her father, Mr. Woodhouse, also a controlling personality, suffers from anxiety and hypochondria, seeing danger at all turns – as a result, he rarely leaves the house, dislikes change of any kind, and hopes to keep anyone he loves safely by his side indoors.  In this he has been frustrated.  Not long back, his elder daughter married John Knightly and set up housekeeping with him and her growing family about a mile away.  Most recently, the girls’ beloved governess and companion, Miss Taylor, or “poor Miss Taylor” as Mr. Woodhouse always refers to her after her departure, has similarly found happiness outside the family hearth when she marries a local widower and moves into her own nearby establishment.  All this distresses Mr. Woodhouse terribly.  With only her father left at home, someone as lively as Emma is sure to find her circumscribed existence boring, so she sets about arranging the lives of others.  Her many forays into match-making drive to plot as marriage is about the only game available to her and those around her.  Her blindness to others leads to one misunderstanding after another and many lives are affected by her meddling.  With some luck, a growing sense of her own limitations, and the help of her sister’s husband’s brother, George Knightly,  in the end all find a happy ending.  Marriage all around!  Although I thought I had long ago read the novel, I must only have seen modern-day film adaptations.  Having a “new” witty Jane Austen to read was a treat.   453 pp.