In Our Time - Emma

Episode Date: November 19, 2015

"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." So begins Emma by Jane Austen, describing her leading character who, she said, was "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss this, one of Austen's most popular novels and arguably her masterpiece, a brilliantly sparkling comedy of manners published in December 1815 by John Murray, the last to be published in Austen's lifetime. This followed Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), with her brother Henry handling publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817). With Janet Todd Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, CambridgeJohn Mullan Professor of English at University College, LondonAndEmma Clery Professor of English at the University of Southampton.Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, at the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc., etc. This writer we know to be Jane Austen, and the novel was Emma, described by some of the speakers in our programme today as her masterpiece

and by one as the greatest novel written in English. The plot revolves around Emma Woodhouse, described by Austin as a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. Several of the other characters do very much like her, though, in particular for a while the conceited bicker Mr. Elton, the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley, and in his way the charming Frank Churchill. Emma, meanwhile, tries to reign marriages for her female friend. She claims success for that of her governess

and now wants even greater success for the lowly Harriet Smith. It all takes place in a small Surrey village, a place in which Emma is virtually immured. Her father wouldn't let her leave the place and she has little inclination to displease him. With me to discuss Emma R. John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London. Janet Todd, Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen, an honorary fellow of Newham College, Cambridge, and Emma Cleary, Professor of English at the University of Southampton.

Emma Clare, to understand Emma better, what do we need to know about Jane Austen's early life? Well, it was around the time that Emma was written and published that Jane Austen began to define her specific field as a novelist. She wrote to one correspondent, three or four families in a village is the very thing to work on, and to another that she specialised in scenes of domestic life in a country village. And so these were her roots. This is where she came from, what she knew best. And she decided that this is what defined her as a writer. She was born in December 1775 in a small village, Steventon, 16 miles south of Basingstoke.

Her father was George Austin, a clergyman, but not a clergyman like Mr. Elton in Emma. He was very well-educated, cultivated and very hard-working. He was also quite poor. And it wasn't quite enough to live off his earnings as a vicar at Steventon. And so he also on the side ran a boarding school for boys from his own home. And did a little bit of farming on the side as well. Her mother, Cassandra, was also very intelligent. She had a dry sense of humour.

She had aristocratic connections, but was really willing to put her shoulders to the wheel as well. Together they raised six boys and two girls. The boys, well, the oldest one went into the clergy, like his father. We don't need to go through all the boys. Let's meet with the girls. Okay, but it's interesting. I think it will be important later on. Yes, it will, but six is enough to start with at this day.

Okay, okay. And in various ways, they influenced her life and her thinking, the careers that they went into. What did Jane Austen written before Emma? She had written three full novels by the time she was in her mid-20s in the 1790s. She had drafts or first versions of sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. But she didn't have the connections or the Savo Affair somehow to get these works published. And so it didn't happen. And it wasn't until 1810 that, with the help of her brother Henry,

who was by that time a banker in London, she managed to get a contract for sense and sensibility. As I understood it, her parents wrote as well, didn't they? Yes. And her very much encouraged her. And her father, Richard, educated her at home, but more than anything, gave her access to a very big library. That's right.

Yes, I don't know about a very big library, but certainly a choice library. They were enthusiastic about novels. That was an unusual thing about them. I think her father even read Gothic novels. We've got a record of that in her letters. So it was a very stimulating environment. There were amateur theatricals, there were riddles games like in Emma.

And they were all scribblers. But almost all of them did some form of writing, wrote comic poems or essays. Two of her brothers even ran a journal called The Loiterer for a little while. He died without much money and left Jane Austen and her sister and her mother, virtually penniless, saved by one of the six brothers. Yes, that's right. and then she felt she could get on with being a more professional writer. Yes. Well, it took a while still to get established. There were years in the wilderness, yes.

They lived in Bath for a while, the unmarried daughters with their mother and father. And then when the father retired, died in 1805, they moved to Southampton for a little while to live with a sailor brother. And then finally they got to this little house, this cottage in Chorton, which was part of the estate of her brother. Edward. And it's at that point that she took out her manuscript, started to revise them, and away she went with her career, with sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice in Mansfield Park. John Mullen, what reputation did Jane Austen have at the time of Emma's publication? Well, you read out the title page of Emma by the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc., etc. and sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice in particular,

and Mansfield Park as well, to a lesser extent, were quite successful, quite widely admired, quite widely read. She made some money from at least a couple of them anyway. And this sort of body of novels did, I think, had begun to exist in the imagination of a polite reading public. But many of those people would not, most of the. those people, I think, would not have known who Jane Austen was. It was actually with the publication of Mansfield part the year before Emma

that the secret, if that's the right word, began to leak out. I mean, her brother Henry started boasting about it. And it's evident that, I mean, it's a famous fact that Emma, when it appeared, was dedicated to the Prince Regent, a man whom Jane Austen abhorred. dissolute gorman with many mistresses, but he was a fan of her writing and requested her through his librarian

to dedicate her next novel to him. So she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation, but not necessarily, I mean, quite a few of those people wouldn't have known who she was. They certainly wouldn't have known that she was this person in a village in Hampshire. And I think it's quite important comparing Jane Austen to other writers,

that she knew no other writers. I mean, she was member of no circle, no literary circle. There were comical attempts later in her last years to meet a famous person. She thought she might meet George Crabb. She never did. And this is in the age where, the age of romantic literature,

where literary circles are the thing. Everybody hangs out with everybody else. I mean, every writer in front. Britain meets Coleridge, but even sort of the peasant poet John Clare comes to London and meets other writers. And this extraordinary sense of her work is being read and talked

about by friends and acquaintances and members of her family, but not other novelists, let alone other major literary figures. Yet she has, as I learned from your notes, she has ambitions to be a literary figure, she has ambitions to make money from her writing.

She isn't in it for just the hobby. and that's very much part of her intent. And she does get some critical attention. She does. Even though that too is anonymous. She does. She does. I mean, her early fiction gets some good reviews.

And Emma eventually, it gets a review by Sir Walter Scott, although he's probably kind of told to do so by John Murray. And it is anonymous. And it is anonymous. But I think you're, I mean, the first thing you said is absolutely right. Jane Auster, I think there's two important things. One's provable and one. my feeling. The provable thing is she cared a great deal about making money. She didn't have much money.

Any money that she made from her novels was sort of extra money for her. She didn't have an income. She relied on the charity in a sense of her brothers. And so that was very important. But the second thing I think is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really, high ambitions. I think she knew. She was doing completely new things with fiction. She didn't have anybody, I think Mansfield Park was the first novel, which wasn't, as it were, responding to other people's novels. She was responding to herself from Mansfield Park. Can we just take that on briskly, John? She reworked her, when she started to get published. She reworked some of the earlier novels.

Yes. I mean, so it's very important, as Emma says, sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice. We don't. the originals of those, but they were reworked versions of early stuff. Mansfield Park was not. And from Mansfield Park onwards, she is doing entirely new things. And she is inventing technical. I mean, you know, people think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. O contrary, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction. I'm sure we'll come back to that, John. If I come back to you, I'm sure we'll come back to that.

And I can repeat that because, Jan and Todd, for those who haven't read Emma, would you, I'm sorry, but you can be as brisk as you want. It's seven sentences you do it. Well, I think not, actually. Bristly, a summary, but once a summary. It's either, you can either do it very, very quickly or you can do it in a great long time. And I should try to be something between, brisk, I think. Because it's either about nothing or it's about everything. everything. It's a fantastic novel.

If you start actually describing it, you feel a bit like Mariah Edgeworth saying, well, what is it about? All we know is that Mr Woodhouse liked very thin gruel, and what is it about? I think the story would do it, to tell you the truth. Well, I'm trying to do the story. I'm getting there.

There's the three or four families in the... I did get the short story in this one. The three or four families in the country village, and it's about a community as well as about a character. Emma. It's called Emma, and it begins with Emma alone in intellectual solitude, although she's rich, privileged, healthy, only 20 and beautiful. She is living with a sickly, selfish, foolish, adoring elderly father. And she's just lost her governess and friend, and she is lonely. And she's also bored. boardom is much disgust in this period.

And she seeks a friend and she lights on Harriet Smith, a boarding school girl below her in social status of only 17. And she proposes to train her up to be a friend. She treats her rather like a doll. She says, come and walk and we walk and come and stay and she stays. And Mr. Knightley, the neighbouring squire who's been advising her and talking to her since she was a very small child, warns her that this is wrong and that she will do Harriet damage.

And sure enough, she does because she persuades the girl to not to be interested in the very pleasant tenant farmer who's in love with her and who is more on her status. But to go for the rather, with a very handsome new vicar, Mr. Elton. Of course, it turns out that Mr. Elton is more interested in Emma and her £30,000. pounds and when the mistake is realized in a very, very funny scene, Mr. Elton goes off in High Dudgeon and comes back with a wife so ridiculous that she is one of the joys of the book, Mrs. Elton and her snobbishness and her apparatus of happiness is, I think, to me, a great pleasure. After that, two more people come in. I am moving along briskly here. First there is Jane Fairfax, a beautiful orphan of great accomplishments, and Emma is jealous of her.

This is the friend she should have had, except of course she wasn't around at the time, but nonetheless Mr Knightley feels this is the friend she should have had. Emma tries, but Jane is very reserved. And as a result, Emma, who has a great deal of imagination and spirit, invents a back plot for her, which is malicious. She's helped in this by the other visitor to the town, Frank Churchill, a rich young man whom Emma had always thought dedicated to herself when he finally showed up.

He does come and they have a very edgy courtship. I am coming to the end. You have got all the men characters and it's this and that and the other and then they end up with... But it's like a great party, everybody comes in. It ends up with marriages. It ends up in marriages. It's about marriage very heavily.

So, no, no, it was very good. It was very good. It was just, you know, I think you'd done it. So that's fine. They all marry the right people. They all marry the right people, that's right. Sort of. Exactly.

I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it. This is written in 1815, just to put the demarcation in place, Waterloo, things going on, turmoil, revolution, terror and all that sort of. Not a whiff of it. Not a whiff of it Well there is a whiff There's a whiff

There's a whiff There's a whiff There's a whiff There's a kind of interesting and maybe ironic Or maybe absolutely sincere Patriotism in it It is very clear

About England That's a waft more than a whiff Isn't it really No it's a whiff But it's about England It's England It's a waft about England Versus France

Maudit England Versus French And their silly language And their ways that is very much there. And I think it's also about what is the kind of England that is coming into being.

It's in England where things are changing, where people are coming back from the war, the war is over, it's not going to be another war for a long time. How is it going to work? How is it going to work as people go back into positions they should perhaps be holding? Do you think there's much about there really? I mean, I just, you're reading deep,

it's more about those people you've mentioned and the machinations and intricacies and the evolutions of the plot around the 8 to 9 them, isn't? Yes, but the people are moving up. The Coles and Mr Perry are moving up in a social status, and Emma, through whose eyes we mostly look, is worried about it.

She doesn't know what to make of it. There are shifting things in the village, and the village is close to London. It feels London pushing against it. We've got our own Emma here, clearly. How does Emma Woodhouse compare to other Australian heroines? Yes, well, she is spotlit by the... the title. This is the only one of Austin's title which features the heroine.

And in doing that, she's sort of highlighting her own daring in creating such an original, such an unusual heroine. Heroines in the proper mold were underdogs. They were Cinderella's. They had to face all sorts of melodramatic trials and tribulations. They were bereaved. They fell into poverty. They had threats to their own. reputation. They had pursuing villains, seducers. And so all of that was swept aside by the opening paragraph of Emma, which lays down all her advantages, her material, worldly advantages, and insist that nevertheless, this is going to be an interesting person to follow. But it does highlight a danger in the first chapter. She's facing the danger of intellectual solitude.

is the phrase that's used there. And Austin takes that really seriously. And I think that is the sort of driving force of the entire novel, this danger of intellectual solitude, which really is based on the very limited horizons that even a very privileged woman had at that time. She also takes seriously the fact that she fears that no readers will like Emma pay for herself because she is conceited and snobbish and manipulating

and very classic. and intolerable in many ways. That's why a lot of readers didn't like her at the time. Now, you've all marinated into admiration, but at the time. Oh, yes, absolutely. So, I mean, that's another aspect of her experimentalism and her daring. Yeah, but let's stick to the point. She's very snobbish.

She's very manipulative. She's very spoiled. This is okay. I mean, this is what she is, though, isn't she? She's mixed. She's mixed. She is intelligent, she's resourceful. She's imaginative.

She's funny. She's funny. She's witty, exactly. She's kind and she's compassionate as well, and she's pragmatic. She has all sorts of good features. She's cruelly as well. She's wasted in the environment. So she's warped by these narrow circumstances that she's forced to fit with.

I was just going to say, yes. I mean, all these qualities are there, but in a way it's beside the point, because we're standing and talking about her, as if, you know, we're in our favour. Heroin, Unfavorant, Heroin Competition. But the point about the novel is it's almost, not entirely, but almost entirely narrated through Emma's consciousness

in incredibly sophisticated and funny ways. And so we don't look at Emma. I mean, we do, we do judge her, and we're expected to judge her, but also we inhabit her. We see the world through her eyes. And a lot of the plot things that Jan, I think, brilliantly managed to pack it, are things, some of them are things we see immediately, but some of them, I think, are things that on first reading,

we don't see immediately because we're seeing the world as Emma sees it. And Jane Austen uses this technique, which wasn't described until the early 20th century called Free and Direct Style, which she invented, actually. I mean, she invented it, and novelists since have sort of used it, and nowadays novelists use it without even thinking about or knowing what it is, which is to narrate a novel, not in the voice of a character, but through the mind and warping predilections and prejudices of the character.

And that's what she does. And that's why Jane Austen's thing about nobody will like her. It's a joke. I think it's a joke. I don't think she minded about it at all. She was laughing about it. John, can I come to you about sticking rather obstinately to the character of Emma? Nobody is willing to.

It's very strange. She is fictional. You all want to wash. I know. I know, but I'm interested in fictional characters. I'm sure you are. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. I mean,

The fact is that she's being washed clean all the time. Her snobbery makes you cringe. Her manipulation of Harriet. She's very cruel to Harriet. She takes Harriet away from a very good marriage, and Mr Knightley reprimands her, Emma, for that. She's nasty about the... On Box Hill, she has a spasm of nastiness,

a snobbish nastiness. When she rejects Mr. Ellen, she says it's partly because he doesn't realise the number of... The distance between himself and herself, and herself. She's so much higher up the social scale than he, how dare he even proposed to her. Let's get that on the table and then

we can move forward. Well, I think you've put it on the table, actually, but I think it is there. I think the cruelty is there and I think it's there more perhaps than both of you have stressed. I think there are times when I really found her intolerable. There was one point where

Harriet, you know, the simple child she's only 17, she's had no background at all, seize the Martins again. And it's a very awkward situation. They all like her very, very much in the shop. And she narrates this in a very simple, straightforward way

and Emma is almost moved for a moment and then it says, what can you expect from a silly, shallow girl like Harriet? And this is a girl she's taken into her house as supposedly her friend. Things like that I think are almost unforgivable.

She's played with us as if she were a dull, really? Yes, she is. And it goes on And I think the Box Hill, yes, of course, she's shadowed by Miss Bates in many ways and she worries about her. But nonetheless, to say something like that in a public place is not acceptable. Emma. I do feel you're exaggerating the dark side of Emma because I think... I'm drawing attention to it. I was about to switch and say, but they're a great quality.

Which you can do for me. Okay, that is what I will try to do. I'll try to make a case for her. I think it's made very apparent to the reader just how constraining, how claustrophobic her circumstances are and that really it's through the lack of any options in her life that she is forced into this sort of fantasist role. And I think there's a real feminist agenda actually with this novel, which can be seen through an array of female characters. we've got Jane Fairfax, who by rights really should be the heroine of the novel.

She is more of the standard heroine. She's an orphan. She has no means. She has no dowry. She's doomed to life as a governess. And she has this extraordinary outburst where she says, you know, the trade in governesses is like the slave trade. You know, she doesn't say that it's got the same cruelty involved, but that nevertheless there's

something involuntary and oppressive about it. And one feels fundamentally sympathetic to sympathetic words of her because she's ruled over by a tyrant. Yes. And her have, her father is either sick or pretends to be sick. And he won't let her out of his sight. He wants her to eat what he wants her to eat.

He won't let her go to the place. She lives, she's never been to London, and 15 miles away, never been to seaside. And can't go anywhere with it. So she's tyrannized by this man, whom she, for whom she is what we would now call, a devoted carer. And we see this.

this extraordinary forbearance. We see the way she checks what she wants to say. She tries to compensate for his damaging behaviour to others. I mean, she's absolutely masterful in that and in different circumstances. If there were an Emma today, you know, she would be

a businesswoman. She would be someone showing these sort of extraordinary ability she had to best advantage. She could go to Oxford, study P.P. and become Prime Minister. I think it's John's turn. I can't do it. All right. I mean, yeah, Mr. Woodhouse is with his habits of gentle selfishness.

It's a verbally wonderful novel, full of these kind of killing phrases. And he's hilarious. But the thing about Mr. Woodhouse is that, in some ways, he's the opposite of his daughter. She thinks that she knows what other people are like. And this is one of the many ways in which, you know, that when you're reading it, however awful,

she sometimes is. There's a bit of most readers that think Emma Woodhouse, say moi, because she's always coming, she's trying to work out what's going on in other people, people's heads and that's what makes her interesting but shows most of the time she's wrong. He is incapable of thinking that anybody's different from him. So this is an absolute sort of deadly neutralising thing. So he assumes that everybody thinks like him. And I mean the most incredible thing about Mr. Woodhouse, this sort of valetudinarian, is that he must have

had sex at least twice in his life because he's got two daughters. It's inconceivable. And he's a sort of enemy to match from me. But he's conceivable because it was conceivable. And this is a which everybody, every possible pairing of young people is being imagined, except the one that's going to really happen, Emma and Mr. Knightley, of course. And he can't see it at all, because to him matrimony is the enemy, and he doesn't realise what's going on around him. Jane. Just to come in on that, I think Jane Austen has a sort of a soft, ironic spot

for these vegetable people, because she likes Lady Bert. Enough doesn't like, but she presents with a sort of loving concern, and Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park as well. People who can hardly get off the sofa. And Mr. Woodhouse is like that. And yes, indeed, he's an absolute tyrant of his daughter. At the same time, and he has warped her because, of course, she is first with him.

He also adores her. And so she can't imagine a life, or she worries about a life, where she isn't so totally central. Her mother's died when she was young. Yes, when she was five. And she needs to be central to somebody, so that man is the centre.

But to go back also to your point that you, yes, one is Emma and you are because you're in the book but I always feel a certain I have a sort of anxiety about Emma that if I was there I'd be more like Mrs Elton and that she would find one quite inelegant and be incredibly snobbish I mean I find the whole

I found Emma very interesting but I also found the whole of Highbury interesting and all these people in it and there is something about Emma because we're inside her that is terribly appealing as is anybody we're inside. At the same time, I still think you have to hold on to. There is a kind of, there is a cruelty and something quite disturbing.

But don't you think she, I agree with Emma Cleary, not Emma, what has that, that, that, but she's warm. But you are misjudging her a bit because the point is that Jane Austen, as it were, gives you the material to make your judgment. So the example you gave, which is a brilliant one, of Harriet Smith meeting the man she's rejected and her sister. and telling, guilelessly telling Emma her puppet mistress about this. And the brilliant thing is Emma doesn't respond by thinking,

oh, but they're silly people. She has to conquer her immediate realisation that what is it, there's a mixture of wounded feelings and delicacy in their response. And she knows that. She's clever. She's understanding. And she has to fight to reassert her absurd pride and power.

And it's because of that that she's a. character like no characters ever existed before. She's also a reader and she does the same thing when she looks at him and reads the letter she realizes that it's a very good letter so she has to wipe it out and Emma. This is a letter that Martin writes

to Emma, yes. And she's always trying to avoid other people's words in a way she goes... But she does learn and she learns. I mean that's what's so great about it. That's why she has conscience. Yeah she is fieriously judgmental isn't she? That is

me being unfair to her, I mean, she is ferociously judgmental. Absolutely, but I think you've got to measure that against the pressures on her. Her only purpose in life is to be Queen B of this village, so anyone who challenges that is

going to be in trouble. When I say these things, I think I'm on John Mullen's side, describing somebody, describing somebody who the contradictions and the delusions which are discovered at a moment are the enrichment. But one mustn't duck the fact that they are some pretty dark, well, they're not dark,

Well, things are going, let's talk about marriage. Yeah. Okay. Go on then, John. Marriage? Oh, well, I mean, I said a hybrid. And Jan was saying this wonderful world of Highbury where sort of nothing happens, yet everything's happening. And one of the everything that is happening is that people are imagining pairings, you know, and this is something that Jane Austen knew in her own life,

and she makes the humming heart of her fiction. So everybody sort of between the age of 15 and 40, who isn't married might marry somebody. And everybody is speculating and thinking and wondering who will marry who. And Emma is a matchmaker and she's making matches in her mind and this is nearly disastrous. But also for the reader, this is a kind of,

it's a kind of a detective story actually as well because we talked about, Jan talked about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. I think most people, the first time you read the novel, you absolutely know that Mr Elton is really after Emma and what a fool she is not to see it and as he himself says when she says to him he proposes and she says but what about Miss Smith?

He says one of the most truly evil lines in literature. He says, I mean some men might not everyone has his level. I mean isn't that fantastic? But we all see that but I think on the first reading we don't see what Frank Churchill's up. He is so cunning and he has arrived in order to, let us say, canoodle with Jane Fairfax. But he can't do it most of the time on his own.

He manages to get me on her own once and he has to do it in front of other people. And she, Emma, has no idea what he's up to. And I think the first time we read it, we don't. And I think every time you read it, you see how cunning even more cunning he is. Can I go to John, Ian? Sir do you want that because I want to ask you a question as well. Can I just say that Mr Knightley is the sort of detective of the whole book. He's the great landowner squire.

He's the squire. He's a good man. He's a good man, except that he's a bit unimaginative, and he doesn't dance when he should, and he doesn't necessarily use his carriage. And he hasn't got quite enough money either to do up his grounds and his house. He dances quite well eventually. He dances quite well in the end.

But he is a kind of detective. And he has a reason because, of course, he's in love with Emma. It transpires. Since the age, since she was 13. Exactly so. Some people find this a little odd. But he also knew her as a baby. I mean, he has always been there. He's one of these familial lovers who comes into the story.

He's a brother-in-law as well. But he is the kind of detective. He's looking for clues throughout because he thinks that there is something wrong about Frank Churchill. And so he's always looking. They play games. They play riddles. They do all these things. And they try to second-guess each other. They try to look for clues as if the whole place was playing a game

and they listen to their other people's weird language and see if underneath it they can hear something that they shouldn't perhaps know. What you hope you on the role of Mr Knightley? Mr Knightley has a cent for... Of course it's called Knight's Perfect Gentle Night years. He is in his own way, he's not so much a manipulator, but he sort of is going around the village clearing up the map. really, isn't he?

That's not quite how I see him, no. We have slight disagreements, but, you know, he enters the novel in the first chapter as a sort of figure of salvation, almost. I mean, he is Emma's only resource, really, in this novel. He is the one who is going to make life possible for her.

And the first conversation between him and Emma is so exhilarating. It's just wonderful. I mean, there's a massive age gap between them, as you've mentioned. about 17, 18 years. But she gives as good as she gets. It's like Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy again. But sort of in a slightly different way.

He's not a stranger. He's someone familiar. They have this wonderful sparring relationship. And, you know, it's like a screwball comedy. Or it's like Oberon and Titania in Midsummer Nightstream. And there are many allusions to Shakespeare in the course of the novel. The course of True Love Never Did Rum True. All that.

Can I go back to Jan for one second, Jan Todd? Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton, it can be something rather annoying and over-verbose. What can we tell about Emma from the way she reacts to them? Well, in some ways, they're shadows of Emma. I actually enjoy them thoroughly. There are people who find Miss Bates utterly irritating.

I mean, it's an interesting thing, isn't it, how you actually write in a novel, describe a rattle. and you want to show a medley of indiscriminate prose without boring somebody. And I think she does, though there are people who find this baits boring, as Emma clearly does. But it's also been pointed out that if you listen to her speech, you will find out a lot more about the village than you would otherwise know, and she actually gives away a fair number of clues.

But I think the point you're actually asking is why does Emma so much dislike her, because she's boring and stupid and so on and so forth, but not entirely stupid. She understands when she's been got at by Emma very quickly. But I think in some ways she shadows her. After all, she is stuck there with an elderly mother. She is a spinster. And one of the things where Harriet does catch Emma is where she says, if you don't marry, as you say, you won't because you're first in your father's house

and you are everything to your father. Why do you need any other man? Why do you need to go when you're rich? Harriet says, but you'll be like Miss Bates. So there's that shadow of that always there. And then, of course, Miss Bates is the aunt and has to live with Jane Fairfax. And again, these relationships of tyranny, of kindly tyranny, is something that Emma knows all about. So I think it's to do with that, with the fear of spinsterhood and what it means.

But I also think Mrs. Elton is another thing altogether. Mrs. Elton has come in with her apparatus of happiness and her music and her accomplishments and in some ways she's a terrible sort of shadow of what Emma is. I mean she's much stupider and she has no ability in the way that Emma has to change and to grow and to learn from her mistakes. At the same time, that snobbishness,

that manner of patronising people, of taking them up, of feeling oneself superior, of not understanding that you have to create a community all the time. That is something that is a bit close to the worst side of Emma. Would you like to talk a bit more of Mr Knightley, Emma? You're in a great position to do it with your name. Yes, well, he's often... Well, he's been rather neglected in this conversation.

Yes, he has a little bit, hasn't he? So Mr. Knightley is an interesting figure. In a way, he represents tradition. Donwell, Abbey is described in a... in a beautiful passage through Emma's point of view as the epitome of Englishness. It's calm, it's just lit by this beautiful soft sun and so on. But at the same time, he's a working man. He's absolutely involved in the life of the community.

He is the presiding genius over the various plans for, you know, upholding. I think he's a magistrate, probably. He runs a parish council. So he's a very active man, and you get a glimpse of that side of things. I think there's a sort of taste of Hardy almost in the picture of Mr. Knightley and also actually of Robert Martin. There's a tiny little vignette where we get that side of the life of Highbury. And Mr. Knightley's love for Emma, which has been sort of touched on as being,

it's a bit weird because, you know, he said he started loving him when she was 13. But actually within the novel, I think it's very brilliantly done. You can read Emma. I mean, if you've read it lots and lots of times, you might think, I'm going to read it just for Mr. Knightley this time. And if you read it just thinking about him, Frank Churchill comes in. And one of the subsidiary points about Frank Churchill is he, even as soon as his name's mentioned,

he starts generating something that Jane Austen's very interested in, which is jealousy. Jealousy. And very, very subtly, I think, Mr Knightley starts changing in his address to Emma actually and his response to her and she doesn't see it or she sees it and is puzzled by it. Why is he so cross about this man he hasn't even met? And Mr. Knightley's love, I mean Jane Austen knows exactly what she's doing.

His love for Emma which comes right at the end as a sort of surprise to Emma but it shouldn't be a surprise to the reader because his sort of love story is there too. Also for the first time he's got a real rival and that terrifies him, I think. I think it's clever the way that... No, I'm just going to say that it's also clever the way that if you go back through the book, you see that Emma has been noticing him over and over again. She notices where he stood in a particular time. I said, well, oh, that was where Mr. Knightley stood, that he came in his carriage.

Yes, he came, of course, to bring the bates, as you find later, but she notices it. And over and over again, although it's amassed... and Jane Austen is wonderful at these great mass social scenes. She knows where Mr Knightley is at every moment. Is there any... Sorry, please say. Just to add to that, I mean, there is something again so unusual about their relationship, Mr. Knightley and Emma's.

It's very egalitarian and it's not blind to faults. There's no idealisation going on here. In what ways does she find fault with him? Oh, often. You know, she criticises him, for instance, for not sort of living up to his status in the community. She teases him on numerous cows.

She says you're so unfair to Frank Churchill. She goes, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. She gets him on jealousy. Yes. And very clearly. And that is such, as you said, is such a big theme in the whole book. Sorry. And there's a lovely bit where

she teases him about his notion that he's going to look after his young nephews, who she actually has responsibility for because he has more time. Of course, he doesn't have more time. Emma's the one with all the time on her hands. And she does it in such a kind of loving but also teasing way. It's like nothing else, I think, in the fiction up to this point.

He also is the best man in the book. And Emma says at one point, I deserve the best because I never booked up with anything else. He thinks he's the best woman. He has this. I blamed you and lectured you and you have born. There's no other woman. in England. What does wonder how many other women in England he knows, but still?

Well, neither of them knows very many other people. But in Highbury, they are the best and the two best marry. Hibri I could have put up with, but the best know the woman in England hard to swallow, but it's hyperbole. But he's hyperbole. Absolutely. I say it's hyperbole. We don't hear what she says after all, so we do want to hear what he says.

Where did Emma well, all right, finally, where does Emma rank among the novels of Jane Austen in your opinions? We've got to We've got a whiff or a wharf from John, but let's end with him. Briefly. I think it is her masterpiece.

It's the last book that she, we know that she absolutely finished. Persuasion may well, and I think has not been entirely revised. So Emma is the culmination of her career, and it is the cleverest, the most subtle, the one in which she thinks about her own artistry as well as putting artistry into the book. So yes, I think it's her masterpiece. Emma. For artistry, it must be first. I think for feeling and plot, for myself, it's persuasion. But yes, it is an extraordinary achievement. And of course, it's had a great legacy, which I hope will be a have time to talk about. Yeah, I mean, I think it's her greatest novel. I mean, lots of Jane Austen fans, and I'm with Emma on this, will find persuasion the most moving of her novels and those powerful.

in a way, the most visceral. But Emma is just fictionally the most complicated. It's as if with Emma, you feel, it's like reading 12th night or something. You feel the person who wrote this can do anything they want. They are totally in control. And I think because of that,

it's also one of the very greatest of all novels in English. And you can read it over and over again. And see things, and see little tricks. But she's left for posterity. And only on the 10th reading do you manage to find. We all think it's brilliant. Yes. Thank you very much. Janet Todd, Emma, and John Mullen.

There's a quiz on Emma on our webpage. Next week we'll be talking about the sale in which trials. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. This is when we complain about all the things we didn't get in. Say how terrible I was and how we didn't do anything. We should have done. This is now going down very well. If they ever come again, not the plot, please. You did the plot. I keep saying we should do Anne Radcliffe. If anybody ever else wants to want to do the mysteries you're dog.

You're right. Mrs. Elton is just... I think Mrs. Elton is brilliant. Sorry, it's the Garden of England. It's the Garden of England and the Baruch-Land-O. It's just so funny. And then when Emma says, oh, well, I think quite a few counties have been called the Garden. No, I think not. Only sorry.

But see, I think what we didn't catch, if I'd say anything, it's the humour. It is a very funny book. And I think that's why I like it. now that I'm old. I think when I was a bit younger, I wanted passion of the sort that you get in persuasion. I always liked that.

But now that I am now, oh, I think that I, I think there's a lot in this that is wonderful. It shows you how to carry on. Because even the thing that you were talking about, Melvin, about her being cruel with Harriet Smith, which is completely true.

But even then, Emma sometimes laugh. I mean, one of the cruelties is that Emma and you sometimes laugh, at Harriet Smith's suffering. So Harriet Smith, after she's discovered Mr. I've never loved her, there's a bit I was just reading the other day, where Emma's trying to find other things to talk about, so that she doesn't go on about Mr. Elton, and she's talking about the poor in Highbury.

And Harriet naturally says, Mr. Elton was so kind to the poor. And she brings out these little things that she's kept like a child. I mean, the poor guy, yes. Maybe I feel more distressed. Because Mr. Elvin's not kind to the poor. He's a horrible person. I'm not interested in Mr. Elland, I'm interested in Harriet that stage.

And that's a remark from a stricken 17-year-old who's been horribly snubbed and let down. And so that's where my attention is. I'm banging the table. Attention, I'm not banging the table. I'm just tapping on it, practicing my piano. And that's a different thing. So I think it is funny in a way, but I'm more moved by it.

This girl's not knowing what's happening to her. She's been taken up by this very superior, this sort of goddess of the village. And May, just, they tried to, Emma tries to turn into somebody else. And of course it doesn't work. I feel very sorry for her. Am I the only one of the only one of her? At one point she looks at her and she says, there's Harriet sitting, looking pretty, and that's all she needs.

And we have no idea. She is such a child. We don't know what's inside it. The brilliant dialogue, isn't it, between Mr Knightley and Emma, when Mr Knightley discovers what she's done and when Mr Knightley really lays it on the table. And Emma says it's quite clever things and he said goes, rubbish.

You're talking balded at you. That's the occasion for one of these wonderful phrases that the novel abounds with. He rises in tall indignation. But at the end of it, there is Mr. Knightley talking to Harriet and saying, I found more in her than I had thought. She has improved. And all well.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. She actually does improve. Has she improved or has she for the first time met a genuine person who's prepared to take her seriously? No, she's been improved because she actually comes. First of all, she just echoes everything that Emma says. She uses the same words. She says, oh, that Jane Fairfax has only technique or something, which is exactly what, you know, Emma would say, that's rubbish.

But later, when she says, and there's a wonderful moment where Emma is suddenly realizing she means Mr. Knightley. And she says, oh miss Woodhouse, you do forget. Yes. Now, the early... That's... That's... The hair's on the back of my neck out with that style. That's a sophisticated statement. And so, although she may not be made more suitable

for the wife of Robert Martin, she has improved. She's learned... I mean, Emma doesn't see it like that. Emma sees herself as somebody who's made a Frankenstein. Yes. As become a Frankenstein, made a monster who's grown self-important. But in fact, she's made somebody who has more self-esteem. That she could say that to... her patroness.

What about legacy? Yeah, Simon, there's some tea or coffee or... Yes. Because the amazing things, I was reading that... I was reading that George Henry Lewis essay about Jane Austen the other day. And actually, I think even he doesn't realise how good it is. But he is really interesting.

He's saying, you know, in the 1860s, well, people are still buying these novels and there are obviously people out there who like them. But he's essentially saying, but none of the clever people I know. know, pay any attention to them at all. And nobody, and still, you know, even... And it's still not on the level of George Elliot.

No, he says she's better. He says in that article, she's better than George Elliotian. But only in certain respects. Intellectually. But isn't it incredible that sort of in the 1890s, Henry James, who gets his techniques from, in a way, from Jane Austen. But he's still really condescending.

I think people are remarkably negative about Austin's work in the 19th century. But even the 20th century said, Conrad writes and says, what's it all about? I've just read Pride and Prejudice. Nambochoff. They're jealous. I don't understand why people say. It's jealousy.

It's jealousy. What about Henry Jane saying everybody's dear, dear Jane? She's so cried up. So I think we're talking about. And then you get one or two people. Virginia Woolf gets it, doesn't she? She totally gets it. There are many more Radio 4 Arts and Discussion Programs to download for free.

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