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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANE AUSTEN

1775

The American Revolutionary War begins in April with the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Jane Austen is born on December 16, in Steventon, Hampshire, England; she is the seventh of eight children.

1778

Fanny Burney—one of the most popular, well-paid, and influential female novelists of the late eighteenth century—publishes Evelina, a landmark in the history of the novel of manners.

1782

Fanny Burney publishes Cecilia.

1783

Austen and her older sister Cassandra attend school in Southampton.

1785

William Cowper, one of Austen’s favorite poets, publishes his most well-known poem, The Task, in which he praises, among other things, the virtues of the countryside.

1788

King George III suffers the first bout of a mental illness that will eventually cause him to relinquish the crown to the Prince Regent.

George Gordon Byron (commonly known as Lord Byron), one of England’s greatest poets and a seminal figure in British Romanticism, is born.

1789

George III recuperates.

The French Revolution begins.

Songs of Innocence by William Blake, radical artist and poet of the early Romantic movement, is published.

1791

American journalist Thomas Paine publishes the first part of Rights of Man, in which he justifies political revolution when a government ceases to protect the natural rights of its citizens.

Ann Radcliffe’s blockbuster gothic novel The Romance of the Forest—which Harriet recommends to Mr. Martin in Emma—is published.

1792

Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is born.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is published; in this work Wollstonecraft argues that it is precisely in order to perform their domestic duties better that women should be better educated.

1793

Louis XVI of France executed. The Reign of Terror begins.

England declares war on France, marking the start of the War of the First Coalition.

1794

The right of habeas corpus is suspended in England.

Austen’s brothers Francis and Charles serve in the Royal Navy.

Austen likely starts writing Lady Susan, an epistolary novel.

Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Austen will parody in Northanger Abbey, is published.

1795

The Speenhamland system begins in England as an attempt to remedy problems with the relief system for the poor in which wages had not kept up with rising prices; the new system gauges relief according to the price of bread so as to prevent bread riots in an age of revolution.

Austen likely begins writing Elinor and Marianne, the first version of Sense and Sensibility.

John Keats, the youngest of the Romantic poets, is born.

The Treasonable Practices Act is passed in England, curtailing freedom of the press. The Seditious Meetings Act is also passed, restricting the size of public meetings and requiring a license for meetings in which political policies are discussed.

1796

Austen begins First Impressions, which she will later revise as Pride and Prejudice.

1798

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is published; the collection is a landmark of Romantic poetry, in which everyday expression is championed as a vehicle for the representation of universal human emotions.

Thomas Robert Malthus, the political economist, publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population, arguing that the human population will eventually outstrip the food supply, thereby posing the primary obstacle to any achievement in the future improvement of humanity.

Austen begins writing Susan, which she will later revise as Northanger Abbey.

The War of the Second Coalition begins; Austria and Russia join England against Napoleon.

1799

The Anti-Combination Act is passed in England, banning workers’ strikes.

Austen’s aunt Jane Leigh Perrot is charged with shoplifting and arrested in Bath.

1801

Austen’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires and moves the family to the fashionable resort town of Bath.

1802

Austen becomes engaged for one night to Harris Bigg-Wither.

1803

Austen sells Susan to Crosby and Co. for ten pounds, but will eventually ask for its return when, after six years, it remained unpublished.

The United States buys Louisiana from France.

The War of the Third Coalition begins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher noted for leading the transcendentalist movement, is born.

During either this year or the next, Austen begins The Watsons, which she never completes, possibly abandoning the novel when her father dies.

1804

Napoleon proclaims himself emperor of France.

Spain declares war on Britain.

1805

Austen’s father dies.

The Battle of Trafalgar, in which England’s beloved Lord Nelson is mortally wounded, marks the turning point in the Napoleonic Wars, resulting in the French and Spanish naval powers’ being crushed.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Sir Walter Scott, one of the most popular novelists and poets of the period, is published.

1806

Napoleon initiates the Continental System whereby he compensates for the French naval defeat at Trafalgar with a policy of economic warfare; the Berlin Decree forbids trade with England.

1807

England responds to the Continental System with a blockade of French and allied ports, thereby initiating an economic blockade of continental Europe. The action triggers an embargo on British trade by the United States.

The slave trade is abolished in England and its colonies.

Austen, her sister, and her mother move to Southampton.

1809

The three Austen women settle at Chawton Cottage on the Hampshire estate of Jane’s brother Edward.

Charles Darwin (the most important proponent of evolutionary theory) and the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson are born.

1810

Elizabeth Gaskell (née Stevenson), the novelist and biographer of Charlotte Brontë, is born.

George III is declared insane.

1811

Sense and Sensibility is published anonymously by the publisher T. Egerton, London.

George III’s son George, the Prince of Wales, becomes the Prince Regent.

Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray is born.

The Luddite riots begin, in which skilled textile workers burn machines installed to replace them.

1812

The first volume of Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm is published.

Novelist Charles Dickens is born.

The United States declares war on Great Britain.

Napoleon invades Russia.

1813

Pride and Prejudice is published.

1814

Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley are published.

Napoleon is exiled to Elba.

The Treaty of Ghent officially ends the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, although fighting continues until May 1815.

1815

Napoleon returns and is defeated at Waterloo.

Emma is published.

In August, Austen starts writing Persuasion.

1816

In his anonymous review of Emma, Sir Walter Scott would be the first writer to recognize Austen’s reinvention of domestic realism.

Charlotte Brontë is born.

Austen completes Persuasion.

Austen’s brother Henry repurchases the manuscript of the still-unpublished Susan (later Northanger Abbey).

1817

Austen begins Sanditon, but never finishes it; she dies on July 18.

1818

Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are published posthumously.

Emily Brontë is born.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published anonymously.

1819

The Peterloo Massacre occurs when soldiers in Manchester, England, charge a crowd of peaceful demonstrators asking for parliamentary reform.

Marian, or Mary Anne, Evans—who will later write novels under the pseudonym George Eliot—is born.

1820

George III dies.

1827

Austen’s mother dies at the age of eighty-eight.

1833

The commercially successful publisher Richard Bentley issues a collected edition of Jane Austen’s novels along with a “Biographical Notice” by her brother Henry.

1845

Austen’s sister Cassandra dies.

1870

A Memoir of Jane Austen is published by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.

INTRODUCTION

WITH TRADEMARK IRONY, JANE AUSTEN FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED the beautiful and rich eponymous heroine of Emma, her fourth major novel, as someone “whom no one but myself will much like.” Snobby, self-centered, and a bit of a bully, Emma nevertheless sparkles with a wit, playfulness, and generosity of spirit that have delighted readers for more than two hundred years. When her longtime governess and devoted friend leaves to get married and begin a family of her own, Emma embarks on a scheme of match-making antics that inadvertently place her center stage in a farce of her own making. A landmark of domestic realism in which the representation of everyday life achieves the excitement of an adventure, a charming romance in which love springs from surprizing places, a riveting mystery in which a secret’s final revelation is artfully prepared by hidden clues, a story of emotional growth in which self-knowledge and fellow feeling temper the raw exercise of power, Emma remains first and foremost a hilarious comedy: As each of Emma’s projects degenerates into an unwitting blunder of cross-purposes, laughter emerges as the uncontested achievement of Austen’s most skillfully crafted novel.

Born on December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was the seventh child of Cassandra and George Austen, the latter an Anglican rector in the parish of Steventon in Hampshire, England. Educated in a busy and sociable home, filled with brothers, a sister, lodging students, and servants, Jane enjoyed access to her father’s extensive library, which included the most popular novels of the day, even gothic shockers and raunchier (by Victorian standards) eighteenth-century fare such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Austen’s domestic circle composed the first of what would be her many fan clubs, some of which now constitute a robust Austen industry of societies, reading groups, and websites. Admiring and critiquing her writing, Austen’s family encountered her fiction first by hearing it read aloud, a popular form of family entertainment akin to television today. Although later male novelists, notably Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, would capitalize on this form of entertainment by staging lucrative public readings of excerpts from their novels, the perceived boundaries between public and private life precluded female authors from peddling their wares in this way. Despite Austen’s obvious literary gifts, financial pressures for the Austen family grew when, in 1801, Reverend Austen gave the Steventon living to his son, James, and retired to Bath, a fashionable resort town that would serve as the setting for parts of two of Jane’s novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. After her father’s death in 1805, Jane, along with her mother and beloved sister, Cassandra, spent several years visiting friends and relatives before settling in a house on an estate belonging to her brother Edward, who had been adopted by wealthy childless relatives in 1783. It was there, in the Chawton cottage, that Austen wrote and revised the six completed novels (some of which she had started earlier) that stand as her oeuvre today: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (published together posthumously in 1818). After becoming ill with what might have been Addison’s disease, in 1817, Austen moved to Winchester in order to be closer to her physician. She died there on July 18 of that year, at the age of forty-one.

Despite recent Hollywood movies—and to the frustration of many biographers—much remains speculative about Austen’s life, due to the draconian measures taken by her family to preserve a posthumous reputation of which they approved, one that culminated in her nephew’s 1870 biography, A Memoir of Jane Austen. Cassandra burned many of Jane’s letters and cut large swaths out of others, repressing representations that did not mesh with an idealized portrait of a matronly woman modestly writing away amid a busy parlor for the unsullied entertainment of her family and friends. The savvy businesswoman who, with an unapologetic eye for profit, left one publisher’s office to seek better terms with another, does not appear. The woman who jilted an accepted lover after less than a day’s engagement never emerges to explain herself. The novelist who invented lines like, “It was a delightful visit; perfect in being much too short” (Emma, chapter 13) is overshadowed by the notoriously precious description she gave of her own writing as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor.” Victorian prudery perpetuated the omissions made by her relatives, who deliberately veiled many of the potentially salacious details of Jane’s life and family, such as the facts that: one of her brothers was institutionalized for madness, another brother given up for adoption by wealthy relatives, an aunt was tried for grand larceny, and her father was implicated in the opium trade. On top of it all, Austen was a bad speller!

What we do know is that Austen hailed from an emerging professional class, one that benefited from the age’s increasingly meritocratic spirit but nevertheless judged itself in the same language that governed traditional forms of authority. As a clergyman, Austen’s father belonged to one of the four traditional professions, the others being military service, the practice of law, and the practice of medicine. Two of Austen’s six brothers would join those ranks as clergymen and two would join the navy, the latter an increasingly profitable and prestigious career during the prolonged Napoleonic Wars. The professional classes of this period are sometimes called “pseudo-gentry” by virtue of their resemblance to the land-owning gentry: Professional families often went to the same schools, read the same books, and shared the same taste as the gentry, but they did not own land that could be bequeathed to subsequent generations. In this sense, their social status relied on professional work rather than on landed property. It is perhaps no accident that so many novelists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries issue from these professional classes for which the idea of property increasingly came to include spiritual and intellectual forms in addition to land. While most of Austen’s heroines are rewarded in their concluding marriages with landed estates, they generally earn that reward through properties of mind and spirit that they already possess. Furthermore, though Austen’s fictional world seems to refer to a highly stratified social hierarchy, nearly all of her main characters fall within the middle ranks; even among the wealthiest of her property-owners, few can boast an aristocratic title. The implicit shift in the definition of property and the focus on an emerging middle-class culture animate Austen’s novels with a democratic, even liberal, air despite the conservative values superficially assumed by a marriage plot as lucrative as it is inevitable.

A consideration of the political values of Austen’s novels can only begin by noting that during her lifetime England was at continual war with revolutionary, and then Napoleonic, France. With revolution abroad, but also riots and mutinies at home, English politics around the end of the eighteenth century was marked by a series of repressive measures—such as the 1795 Seditious Meetings Acts (which restricted the size of public meetings and required a license for meetings in which political policies were discussed) and the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794—that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819, when the British Army charged into a peaceful crowd gathered to demand parliamentary reform. Many critics see Austen’s fiction as contributing to this reactionary climate by following the cues of earlier conservative female novelists such as Fanny Burney, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth, to name a few. Led by Marilyn Butler, these critics place Austen in an anti-Jacobin literary tradition that responded to the threat of French revolutionary politics and to the radical ideas of such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. They point out that Austen’s novels never pose any programmatic remediation for the social injustices they so astutely represent: Austen’s novels never imagine sustainable work opportunities for women; they never criticize the system of primogeniture whereby an estate is entailed only to the eldest male relative, thereby dislocating dependent female relatives; they do not speak out against the press gangs that fought so much of the war; they never propose a coeducational system of national schools. Although Emma voices social protest through the rival heroine, Jane Fairfax, who compares the work of being a governess to slave labor, the novel ultimately uses romantic resolution to sidestep the implication that personal freedom relies on economic power.

Austen’s apparent conservatism generally coalesces around her representation of the landed estate itself. Taking her cues from the political philosopher Edmund Burke, who famously compared English political rights to an “entailed inheritance,” the linchpin of the system of primogeniture, Austen similarly uses the entailed estate to ground her central characters morally. Although the contemporary American reader often balks at the idea that property should pass to the nearest male heir regardless of merit or inclination, the logic of entailment, as the literary scholar Sandra MacPherson has suggested, supports an unwavering commitment to the common good insofar as the claims of unknown others are put before the pursuit of self-gain. Because Mr. Knightley’s estate, Donwell, for example, is entailed to the closest male heir, Mr. Knightley acts merely as its steward for most of the novel. In one of her more transparent delusions, Emma argues that Mr. Knightley cannot marry because a son would deprive her nephew, Henry, the closest male relative, of the estate’s inheritance. Of course, she conveniently forgets her allegiance to her nephew when a son of her own enters into the imagined inheritance, but the novel has nevertheless called our attention to the fact that Donwell is entailed. That Mr. Knightley holds the land only temporarily does not alter the energy with which he goes about improving it, enriching it, caring for it. Indeed, he is the novel’s hero by virtue of his recognition of the claims of others, a quality central to the idea of entailment.

As the literary critic Tony Tanner has pointed out, Emma begins the novel with much wealth and little land. In this sense, she begins without the traditional patterns of socially responsible behavior that Mr. Knightley, as landowner and local magistrate, enjoys. The scale according to which Mr. Knightley judges the world correctly corresponds to his role as the community’s consummate provider—of apples for the poor spinster Miss Bates, a carriage for the untended Miss Fairfax; strawberries for his neighbors; company for Emma’s elderly father, Mr. Woodhouse; and romantic love for Emma. It is no wonder that his estate, the coyly dubbed Donwell (he does indeed do well), is presented through a montage of fecundity: The “sweet view” Donwell affords contains all the “appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.” Although Austen’s brother admonished her for agricultural errors in this famous description of a late spring strawberry-picking outing that includes the scorching heat of summer, the spreading flocks of early spring, the apples of fall, and the fireplace smoke of winter, many readers have persuasively identified the scene as a pastiche of the passing seasons, Donwell emerging not out of a historical past, but out of an ahistorical cycle of seasons, not of a time, but for all time. This celebration of Donwell and its values enables a reading of Emma’s marriage plot as conservative in the submission of Emma’s individualistic and imaginative impulses to the rules of sociability and reason. Equally conservative would be Emma’s eventual dismissal of her friend Harriet, the project of improving Harriet’s social status short-circuited by the “stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth.” For many readers, the severity of Austen’s language undoes the generosity, however self-aggrandizing, with which Emma began the project in the first place.

In contrast to these conservative readings, other critics, led most persuasively by the literary scholar Claudia Johnson, remark that the center of consciousness of each novel remains a woman, one who stands outside traditional authority and whose point of view must ultimately encompass the perspective of the politically disenfranchised. They argue that, though Austen seems to accept the traditional class structure, she nevertheless discloses nasty truths about the forfeiture of paternal responsibilities, the selfishness and hypocrisy of brothers, the fallibilities of self-fashioned mentors, and above all, the inexorable force of a sociability that veils the tyranny of coercion. As a community leader, the character of Mrs. Elton, with her vulgar chatter, officious impertinence, and associations to the slave trade of Bristol, poses a very real threat to Jane Fairfax’s personal freedom and privacy. In Mrs. Elton’s abuse of the community’s governing language—her informalities of address (calling Mr. Knightley, “Knightley”; Miss Fairfax, “Jane”; and her husband, “Mr. E.”), Austen protests the arbitrariness of social power, which Emma herself articulates as “the difference of women’s destiny” when she compares “Mrs. Churchill’s importance in the world” and Jane Fairfax’s in chapter eight of volume three. But this perception of Austen as a radical subversive generally pivots on her use of irony to cleverly cloak a very real and biting cultural and historical commentary at a historical moment unfriendly to social critique.

We understand irony as the humorous recognition of the disparity between what a statement apparently means and what it can be understood to mean. A perfect example of how irony works in Emma occurs not within the story itself, but in Austen’s dedication of the book to the Prince Regent. Supposedly, the Prince Regent’s librarian informed Austen that His Highness was such a big fan of her books that he was giving her permission to dedicate her upcoming novel to him. Lambasted in newspapers as a profligate spender during an expensive war, a corrupt manager who conferred appointments on favorites, and an unapologetic philanderer who, unsuccessful in divorcing his wife, pursued a succession of mistresses and fathered several illegitimate children, the future George IV cannot be said to have enjoyed immense popularity among his subjects, and his invitation was not joyfully received by Austen. Although she initially planned to refuse, her well-mannered siblings and market-savvy publisher persuaded her to view the invitation as a command—that is, as a request that precluded refusal. Thus, the powerful forms of polite culture colluded with the politics of an increasingly commercial literary marketplace to produce a great Austenian irony. Whereas the novel begins with a dedication to a womanizer, it concerns itself primarily with the exercise of female power in what has been called by literary scholars Emma’s “right rule”; what appears respectful might in fact be cheeky insubordination.

Austen’s move from the publisher of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, Thomas Egerton, to John Murray was calculated to capitalize on Murray’s abilities to finesse a changing literary marketplace. Not only was Murray the publisher of Lord Byron’s exceedingly popular romantic poetry, but he owned a literary and political periodical, the Quarterly Review, whereby he was able to secure the famous novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott to review Emma. Like Austen’s previous novels, Emma had initially received mildly positive notices, but nothing written by a luminary such as Scott. Scott’s review is particularly important insofar as he saw in Emma the future of the novel as a genre. By drawing characters and incidents from ordinary contemporary day-to-day life, Austen proved that a good story did not have to be set on a pirate ship, on a desert island, or in an idealized medieval past. This dramatic shift in subject material is what the realist nineteenth-century novel is all about.

Along the same lines, no discussion of Emma would be complete without addressing what is arguably the single most important technical invention in the history of the novel: Austen’s use of what is called free indirect discourse. In direct discourse, punctuation and verb tense maintain the distinction between narrative facts and personal feelings: “Mr. Woodhouse gratefully observed, ‘It is very kind of you, Mr. Knightley, to come out at this late hour to call upon us’ ” (chapter 1). In indirect discourse, the uttering voice begins to be blended into the narrating of facts, so that this sentence would read, “Mr. Woodhouse gratefully observed that it was very kind of Mr. Knightley to come out at this late hour to call upon them.” In free indirect discourse, however, the uttering voice is completely absorbed into the narration. This sentence would look something like, “How very kind it was of Mr. Knightley to come out at this late hour to call upon them!” Punctuation would attest to the immediacy and personality of the voice, which is nevertheless woven into the texture of the narration. Through barely perceptible shifts in point of view, both the narrator and the character contribute to the novel’s representation of reality. When Mr. Elton, for example, returns from London with the notorious picture (his interest in which Emma sees as his attachment to Harriet, the subject, rather than to Emma, the artist), the novel records, “. . . he got up to look at it, and sighed out his half sentences of admiration just as he ought.” Whereas the statement starts as an objective statement of facts (“he got up to look at it”), it ends as a ventriloquizing of Emma’s own voice and her own subjective experience of the facts (“just as he ought”); and with ingenious economy, the sentence lays bare the central flaw in Emma’s character and the thematic motor of the novel’s plot, what Austen called Emma’s “imaginism”: that is, her misperception of the world as reflecting what only her imagination has created. Free indirect discourse allows Austen not only to convey the complexity of this psychological orientation, but also to capitalize on Emma’s energy and vitality. Indeed, Emma’s own speech is characterized in the text by an abundance of dashes, a grammatical representation of a happy, confident liveliness that spills over into the novel’s omniscient narrative spaces as well.

These shifts in voice and perspective are fundamental in Emma, which Austen masterfully structured around Emma’s misinterpretations of the material world. Indeed Emma is celebrated for its precocious and virtuoso sustaining of an irony that allows us to see the world as Emma sees it at the same time that we see what she cannot (although the pleasure of that irony gains significantly in the process of re-reading the book), and much of the novel’s hermeneutical fun derives from the perception of this irony. In straddling a subjective and an objective point of view, Austen is generally seen, as demonstrated by the literary critic Ian Watt, as synthesizing two distinct eighteenth-century literary modes: On the one hand, the first-person subjective storytelling of Samuel Richardson, whose novels take shape as letters, or of Daniel Defoe, whose novels imitate journal writing, and on the other hand, the third-person objective storytelling of Henry Fielding, for whom the material world precedes and ultimately determines the perceiving subject. The straddling lends Austen’s prose tremendous agility as it moves in and out of the characters’ internal lives, conveying a sense of reality that encompasses multiple subjective experiences and thereby illustrates the cultural studies scholar Elizabeth Ermath’s useful definition of realism itself as the coordination of various moments of perception into a single system. In this narrative complexity, Emma challenges us to read with both feeling and discernment, and invites us to balance the competing ideological claims that govern the social lives of individuals not very different from ourselves.

Monica Feinberg Cohen was educated at Yale College and Columbia University, where she now teaches nineteenth-century literature. She is author of Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home.

TO

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE PRINCE REGENT,

THIS WORK IS,

BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S PERMISSION

MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,

BY HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS’S

DUTIFUL

AND OBEDIENT

HUMBLE SERVANT,

THE AUTHOR

VOLUME I

CHAPTER I

EMMA WOODHOUSE, HANDSOME, CLEVER, AND RICH, WITH A comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.—Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief. It was on the wedding-day of this beloved friend that Emma first sat in mournful thought of any continuance. The wedding over and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.

The event had every promise of happiness for her friend. Mr. Weston was a man of unexceptional character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning’s work for her. The want of Miss Taylor would be felt every hour of every day. She recalled her past kindness—the kindness, the affection of sixteen years—how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old—how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health—and how nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood. A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the intercourse of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon followed Isabella’s marriage on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection. It had been a friend and companion such as few possessed, intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, knowing all the ways of the family, interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of hers;—one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and who had such an affection for her as could never find fault.

How was she to bear the change?—It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.

The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr. Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.

Her sister, though comparatively but little removed by matrimony, being settled in London, only sixteen miles off, was much beyond her daily reach; and many a long October and November evening must be struggled through at Hartfield, before Christmas brought the next visit from Isabella and her husband and their little children to fill the house and give her pleasant society again.

Highbury, the large and populous village almost amounting to a town, to which Hartfield, in spite of its separate lawn and shrubberies and name, did really belong, afforded her no equals. The Woodhouses were first in consequence here. All looked up to them. She had many acquaintances in the place, for her father was universally civil, but not one among them who could be accepted in lieu of Miss Taylor for even half a day. It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful. His spirits required support. He was a nervous man, easily depressed; fond of every body that he was used to, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind. Matrimony, as the origin of change, was always disagreeable; and he was by no means yet reconciled to his own daughter’s marrying, nor could ever speak of her but with compassion, though it had been entirely a match of affection, when he was now obliged to part with Miss Taylor too; and from his habits of gentle selfishness and of being never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself, he was very much disposed to think Miss Taylor had done as sad a thing for herself as for them, and would have been a great deal happier if she had spent all the rest of her life at Hartfield. Emma smiled and chatted as cheerfully as she could, to keep him from such thoughts; but when tea came, it was impossible for him not to say exactly as he had said at dinner:

“Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!”

“I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot. Mr. Weston is such a good-humoured, pleasant, excellent man that he thoroughly deserves a good wife;—and you would not have had Miss Taylor live with us forever and bear all my odd humours, when she might have a house of her own?”

“A house of her own!—but where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large.—And you have never any odd humours, my dear.”

“How often we shall be going to see them and they coming to see us!—We shall be always meeting! We must begin, we must go and pay our wedding-visit very soon.”

“My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far.”

“No, papa, nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage to be sure.”

“The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;—and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?”

“They are to be put into Mr. Weston’s stable, papa. You know we have settled all that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night. And as for James, you may be very sure he will always like going to Randalls, because of his daughter’s being housemaid there. I only doubt whether he will ever take us anywhere else. That was your doing, papa. You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her—James is so obliged to you!”

“I am very glad I did think of her. It was very lucky, for I would not have had poor James think himself slighted upon any account; and I am sure she will make a very good servant; she is a civil, pretty-spoken girl; I have a great opinion of her. Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needle-work, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant; and it will be a great comfort to poor Miss Taylor to have somebody about her that she is used to see. Whenever James goes over to see his daughter you know, she will be hearing of us. He will be able to tell her how we all are.”

Emma spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas, and hoped, by the help of backgammon, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own. The backgammon-table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary.

Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it as the elder brother of Isabella’s husband. He lived about a mile from Highbury, was a frequent visitor and always welcome, and at this time more welcome than usual, as coming directly from their mutual connections in London. He had returned to a later dinner after some days absence, and now walked up to Hartfield to say that all were well in Brunswick Square. It was a happy circumstance and animated Mr. Woodhouse for some time. Mr. Knightley had a cheerful manner which always did him good; and his many inquiries after “poor Isabella” and her children were answered most satisfactorily. When this was over, Mr. Woodhouse gratefully observed,

“It is very kind of you, Mr. Knightley, to come out at this late hour to call upon us. I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk.”

“Not at all, sir. It is a beautiful, moonlight night; and so mild that I must draw back from your great fire.”

“But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold.”

“Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them.”

“Well! That is quite surprizing, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour, while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding.”

“By the bye—I have not wished you joy. Being pretty well aware of what sort of joy you must both be feeling, I have been in no hurry with my congratulations. But I hope it all went off tolerably well. How did you all behave? Who cried most?”

“Ah! Poor Miss Taylor! ’tis a sad business.”

“Poor Mr. and Miss Woodhouse, if you please; but I cannot possibly say ‘poor Miss Taylor.’ I have a great regard for you and Emma; but when it comes to the question of dependence or independence!—At any rate, it must be better to have only one to please, than two.”

“Especially when one of those two is such a fanciful, trouble-some creature!” said Emma playfully. “That, is what you have in your head, I know—and what you would certainly say if my father were not by.”

“I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed,” said Mr. Woodhouse with a sigh. “I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome.”

“My dearest papa! You do not think I could mean you, or suppose Mr. Knightley to mean you. What a horrible idea! Oh, no! I meant only myself. Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me you know—in a joke—it is all a joke. We always say what we like to one another.”

Mr. Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them: and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would be so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by every body.

“Emma knows I never flatter her,” said Mr. Knightley; “but I meant no reflection on any body. Miss Taylor has been used to have two persons to please; she will now have but one. The chances are that she must be a gainer.”

“Well,” said Emma, willing to let it pass—“you want to hear about the wedding, and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly. Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks. Not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen. Oh! no, we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and were sure of meeting every day.”

“Dear Emma bears everything so well,” said her father. “But, Mr. Knightley, she is really very sorry to lose poor Miss Taylor, and I am sure she will miss her more than she thinks for.”

Emma turned away her head, divided between tears and smiles.

“It is impossible that Emma should not miss such a companion,” said Mr. Knightley. “We should not like her so well as we do, sir, if we could suppose it. But she knows how much the marriage is to Miss Taylor’s advantage; she knows how very acceptable it must be at Miss Taylor’s time of life to be settled in a home of her own, and how important to her to be secure of a comfortable provision, and therefore cannot allow herself to feel so much pain as pleasure. Every friend of Miss Taylor must be glad to have her so happily married.”

“And you have forgotten one matter of joy to me,” said Emma, “and a very considerable one—that I made the match myself. I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for anything.”

Mr. Knightley shook his head at her. Her father fondly replied, “Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretell things, for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches.”

“I promise you to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world! And after such success you know!—Every body said that Mr. Weston would never marry again. Oh dear, no! Mr. Weston, who had been a widower so long, and who seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife, so constantly occupied either in his business in town or among his friends here, always acceptable wherever he went, always cheerful—Mr. Weston need not spend a single evening in the year alone if he did not like it. Oh, no! Mr. Weston certainly would never marry again. Some people even talked of a promise to his wife on her deathbed, and others of the son and the uncle not letting him. All manner of solemn nonsense was talked on the subject, but I believed none of it. Ever since the day (about four years ago) that Miss Taylor and I met with him in Broadway-lane, when, because it began to mizzle, he darted away with so much gallantry, and borrowed two umbrellas for us from Farmer Mitchell’s, I made up my mind on the subject. I planned the match from that hour; and when such success has blessed me in this instance, dear papa, you cannot think that I shall leave off match-making.”

“I do not understand what you mean by ‘success’ ”; said Mr. Knightley. “Success supposes endeavour. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind! But if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, ‘I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,’ and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards—why do you talk of success? where is your merit?—what are you proud of?—you made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be said.”

“And have you ever known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess?—I pity you.—I thought you cleverer—for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it. And as to my poor word ‘success,’ which you quarrel with, I do not know that I am so entirely without any claim to it. You have drawn two pretty pictures—but I think there may be a third—a something between the do-nothing and the do-all. If I had not promoted Mr. Weston’s visits here, and given many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to anything after all. I think you must know Hartfield enough to comprehend that.”

“A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference.”

“Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others”; rejoined Mr. Woodhouse, understanding but in part. “But, my dear, pray do not make any more matches, they are silly things, and break up one’s family circle grievously.”

“Only one more, papa; only for Mr. Elton. Poor Mr. Elton! You like Mr. Elton, papa—I must look about for a wife for him. There is nobody in Highbury who deserves him—and he has been here a whole year, and has fitted up his house so comfortably that it would be a shame to have him single any longer—and I thought when he was joining their hands today, he looked so very much as if he would like to have the same kind office done for him! I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service.”

“Mr. Elton is a very pretty young man to be sure, and a very good young man, and I have great regard for him. But if you want to show him any attention, my dear, ask him to come and dine with us some day. That will be a much better thing. I dare say Mr. Knightley will be so kind as to meet him.”

“With a great deal of pleasure, sir, at any time,” said Mr. Knightley laughing; “and I agree with you entirely that it will be a much better thing. Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven-and-twenty can take care of himself.”