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fellows in the world. His face, besides being the picture of health, had in it the most apparent marks of sweetness and good nature’ (The History of Tom Jones, Book 9, Ch. 5). Austen had also used the phrase ironically to describe Lady Bertram, ‘sunk back in one corner of the sofa, the picture of health, wealth, ease and tranquillity is … just falling into a gentle doze’ (Mansfield Park, I, Ch. 13). The importance of Emma’s health, which is contrasted with some of the less robust characters, has been discussed by John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, Ch. 3, and Roger Sales, Jane Austen: Representations of Regency England, pp. 135–9.

2. spleen: Ill humour or moroseness.

CHAPTER VI

1. cockade: Rosette or knot of ribbons on the baby’s cap (Emma’s artistic success is with the hat rather than the baby). E.E. Duncan-Jones has suggested that this cockade would be round, citing Mrs David Ogilvy’s letter to Elizabeth Barrett, ‘In those days (1848) young infants wore lace caps with cockades of satin ribbon: a round cockade for a boy, an oval cockade for a girl’, The Jane Austen Society Report for 1991, pp. 9–10.

2. brother: Brother-in-law.

CHAPTER VII

1. Bond-street: Exclusive street in London’s Piccadilly area.

CHAPTER VIII

1. useful helpmate: Compare Genesis 2: 20; Mary Wollstonecraft also urged men to ‘be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish disobedience’ and thus ‘emancipate their companion, to make her a helpmeet for them’, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 9.

2. female right: Compare Wollstonecraft in the ‘Author’s Introduction’ to the Vindication, describing her work as a treatise ‘on female rights and manners’.

3. lady in the case: See the Introduction, p. xxiv.

4. conscious: Self-conscious, usually owing to knowledge withheld from others present.

CHAPTER IX

1. hot-pressed paper: Paper smoothed in a press of glazed boards and hot metal plates.

2. ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid’: See p. xxiv.

3. woe + man = woman: Austen enjoyed charades and wrote warmly to hersisteron29January1813,‘Weadmire your Charades excessively, but as yet have guessed only the1st. The others seem very difficult. There is so much beauty in the Versification however, that the finding them out is but a secondary pleasure’ (Letters, p. 202). Margaret Doody points out that the charade ‘Wozman’ appears in A New Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Transpositions, &c, 2 vols. (London, 1791), I, p. 31, and that ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid’ and ‘Court-ship’ are to be found at I, p. 42 and II, p. 15 (‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 347–63, 362).

4. See note 3, above. Mr Elton’s chosen poem is full of contemporary clichés – contemporary readers might assume that his ‘woman, lovely woman’ was borrowed from Byron’s ‘I would I were a careless child’, l. 41, in Poems Original and Translated (1808), but it might more appropriately recall William Cowper’s ‘The Progress of Error’ (1782):

Pleasure admitted in undue degree,

Enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free.

’Tis not alone the grape’s enticing juice,

Unnerves the moral pow’rs, and mars their use,

Ambition, av’rice, and the lust of fame,

And woman, lovely woman, does the same.

The heart, surrender’d to the ruling pow’r

Of some ungovern’d passion ev’ry hour,

Finds by degrees, the truths that once bore sway,

And all their deep impression wear away. (ll. 269–77)

5. prologue to the play:Plays were often introduced by prologues written in formal verse. Contemporary novels, especially of the romantic or Gothic kind, frequently used verse quotations as chapter headings.

6. ‘The course of true love …’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I, i, 123. Emma’s source may, however, be the Elegant Extracts (London, 1805), II, p. 567, where Lysander’s speech is anthologized under the heading ‘True love ever crossed’. Jocelyn Harris has emphasized the importance for Emma of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘a play about the imagination’ (Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Ch. 6).

7. ‘Kitty’:composed by David Garrick and first published in