Emma - Jane Austen [10]
In a novel that delights in flirtation and embarrassment, the reader is constantly teased into trying to find out exactly what is going on. Just as the central characters, though remarkably prone to misreading situations, seem obsessed with observing each other and establishing the truth of everyone else’s feelings and intentions, so we are drawn into the attempt to resolve individual words, scenes, quotations or actions. But since each reader notices different aspects of the book, and even interprets words subjectively, the end of the novel is really an invitation to return to the beginning and attempt once more to define its meaning.
It is not a straightforward ‘likeness’ of artistic representation and object represented that ‘pleases every body’, but the constant deflection of correspondences from one idea to another, so dazzling in its effect that it is tempting to choose one line of interpretation and ignore any contradictions. To do so, however, is to refuse to play, and although such a reaction avoids the embarrassment of getting things wrong, it also denies the endless enjoyment of Emma’s irrepressible sense of fun.
Fiona Stafford
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. The title page of the first edition reads 1816, but notices advertising its publication indicate that it appeared at the end of December, 1815.
2. W. Scott, ‘Emma’, Quarterly Review 14 (1815), 188–201.
3. P. Hickman, A Jane Austen Household Book (London, 1977); O. MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, pp. 143–4.
4. Some of the references are discussed by R. W. Chapman in the appendix to his edition of Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen (3rd edn, 5 vols.; with additional notes by Mary Lascelles, Oxford, 1966), Vol. 4, p. 498. See also P. Piggott, The Innocent Diversion, Ch. 8. Although the exact setting of the story is inconclusive, I have drawn attention to any recognizable dates in the notes.
5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
6. Though not informed by the theoretical interests of the 1980s, Alistair Duckworth made an important contribution to the subsequent discussion of Austen’s textual riddles and games in ‘Spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards: games in Jane Austen’s life and fiction’, Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. J. Halperin, pp. 279–97. For more recent discussion of the games in Austen’s fiction, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure, pp. 261–301.
7. Joseph Litvak, ‘Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text, in Emma’, PMLA 100 (1985), 763–73.
8. See, e.g., A. Rosmarin, ‘Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History’, ELH 51 (1984), 315–42. For a representative selection of recent critical essays, see D. Monaghan (ed.), Emma, New Casebook Series.
9. Anne-Marie Edwards, In the Steps of Jane Austen (2nd edn, Southampton, 1985), p. 158. F.W. Bradbrook, however, notes an important literary source for Austen’s description in William Gilpin’s Observations on the Western Parts of England, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), sect. II, pp. 11–12, in Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 65–6.
10. Twelfth Night, II, v.
11. Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Weston, Elizabeth’; the family tree of the Westons of Sutton is included in O. Manning and H. Bray’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 3 vols. (London, 1804–14), Vol. 1, p. 135. R.W. Chapman notes the name Randalls in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
12. O. Manning and H. Bray, History of Surrey, Vol. 1, p. xli; R.W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
13. ‘Farmer George’ had been the butt of English satirists since the 1780s – see V. Carretta, George III and the Satirists