Emma [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONWhen Jane Austen embarked on her fifth novel, Emma, she is said to have said, "1 am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." She could not have been more wrong. While hardly anybody has found a good word to say for Fanny Price, the heroine of the preceding novel, most readers and critics have joined in liking Emma and admiring the work. Mine is a dissenting voice. Much as I admire the novel, what I cannot do is "like" Emma. But then, one might argue, Jane Austen does not wholly intend that we should.Emma was published on Jane Austen's fortieth birthday, in December 1815, and was the last of her works to be published in her lifetime. It is a confident and, as her own comment suggests, in some ways slightly provocative performance. It opens with great panache, with one of those great first sentences that seems so effortless that it almost deludes one into thinking one could do it oneself: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence. " The gauntlet thrown down in that word seemed is picked up at once by the attentive reader. Trouble is in store for the happy and comfortable Emma. As storytelling, this is magnificent.It is also immediately obvious, to those readers (like its first) who have been following her work chronologically, that this new heroine will be as unlike her last as possible. Fanny Price, of Mansfield Park, had been unimposing in appearance (on her first introduction as a little girl we are told that at least there was nothing in her to disgust her relations), simple, and poor. Hers was a version of the Cinderella story: the poor waif, the orphan, the ward who wins the prince from her competitive sisters through patience and humility rather than through beauty or wit. Fanny's role was to watch and wait and be silent. Emma's is more active. She can speak, command, direct, manipulate. She has, as we areI i